Direct N-body Modelling of Stellar Populations: Blue Stragglers in M67

By J. Hurley, C. Tout, S. Aarseth, O. Pols. 2000

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a state-of-the-art N-body code which includes a detailed treatment of stellar and binary evolution as well as the cluster dynamics. This code is ideal for investigating all aspects relating to the evolution of star clusters and their stellar populations. It is applicable to open and globular clusters of any age. We use the N-body code to model the blue straggler population of the old open cluster M67. Preliminary calculations with our binary population synthesis code show that binary evolution alone cannot explain the observed numbers or properties of the blue stragglers. On the other hand, our N-body model of M67 generates the required number of blue stragglers and provides formation paths for all the various types found in M67. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the cluster environment in modifying the nature of the stars it contains and highlights the importance of combining dynamics with stellar evolution. We also perform a series of N = 10000 simulations in order to quantify the rate of escape of stars from a cluster subject to the Galactic tidal field.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f29a5c1c5ca74444d0e1a4d8be0927a34bf36866

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Citations in the corpus

A complete N-body model of the old open cluster M67 (2005, methodology): “In fact, this indicates that the model is overproducing BSs, although, if we look at raw numbers, the model has 20 BSs at 4 Gyr compared with 28 for M67 (Hurley et al. 2001).”
Evolution of binary stars and the effect of tides on binary populations (2002, background): “The peak in the blue straggler distribution at approximately 5 000Myr is primarily due to a decrease in progenitor systems and its timing depends on the ratio of the mean binary separation, which remains constant, to the radius of the largest MS star, which decreases in time (Hurley et al. 2001).”
Gravitational N-Body Simulations (2003, methodology): “It also appears that significantly larger cluster ages are needed to produce the maximum observable number of blue stragglers at any one time [Hurley et al., 2001a], which can therefore only be reached for larger cluster models.”
Dawes Review 6: The Impact of Companions on Stellar Evolution (2016, background): “Many blue stragglers may be main-sequence mergers, especially in stellar clusters (Hurley et al. 2001; Section 3.3).”
Population Synthesis in the Blue. IV. Accurate Model Predictions for Lick Indices and UBV Colors in Single Stellar Populations (2007, background): “Moreover, M 67 has a specific blue straggler frequency that far exceeds that of other open clusters with the same central density (Landsman et al. 1998, Ahumada & Lapasset 1995), which is possibly the result of severe mass-segregation followed by evaporation of low mass stars (Hurley et al. 2001).”
The gravitational million-body problem (2001, background): “Hurley et al (2001) estimated that even M67 had 7 times as many stars at birth as at present, and were therefore unable to simulate its early evolution.”
Stellar collisions during binary–binary and binary–single star interactions (2004, background): “For a discussion of the interplay between globular cluster dynamics and stellar collisions, see e.g. Hurley et al. (2001).”