The difficult early stages of embedded star clusters and the importance of the pre-gas expulsion virial ratio
Abstract
We examine the effects of gas expulsion on initially substructured distributions of stars. We perform N-body simulations of the evolution of these distributions in a static background potential to mimic the gas. We remove the static potential instantaneously to model gas expulsion. We find that the exact dynamical state of the cluster plays a very strong role in affecting a cluster's survival, especially at early times: they may be entirely destroyed or only weakly affected. We show that knowing both detailed dynamics and relative star-gas distributions can provide a good estimate of the post-gas expulsion state of the cluster, but even knowing these is not an absolute way of determining the survival or otherwise of the cluster.
- Publication:
-
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
- Pub Date:
- July 2015
- DOI:
- 10.1093/mnras/stv790
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1504.02474
- Bibcode:
- 2015MNRAS.450.2451F
- Keywords:
-
- methods: numerical;
- stars: formation;
- Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies;
- Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 9 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS