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Surviving infant mortality in the hierarchical merging scenario

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 Added by Rory Smith Mr
 Publication date 2011
  fields Physics
and research's language is English




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We examine the effects of gas expulsion on initially sub-structured and out-of-equilibrium star clusters. We perform $N$-body simulations of the evolution of star clusters in a static background potential before removing that potential to model gas expulsion. We find that the initial star formation efficiency is not a good measure of the survivability of star clusters. This is because the stellar distribution can change significantly, causing a large change in the relative importance of the stellar and gas potentials. We find that the initial stellar distribution and velocity dispersion are far more important parameters than the initial star formation efficiency, and that clusters with very low star formation efficiencies can survive gas expulsion. We suggest that it is variations in cluster initial conditions rather than in their star formation efficiencies that cause some clusters to be destroyed while a few survive.



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We examine the effects of gas expulsion on initially sub-structured and out-of-equilibrium star clusters. We perform N-body simulations of the evolution of star clusters in a static background potential before adjusting that potential to model gas expulsion. We investigate the impact of varying the rate at which the gas is removed, and the instant at which gas removal begins. Reducing the rate at which the gas is expelled results in an increase in cluster survival. Quantitatively, this dependency is approximately in agreement with previous studies, despite their use of smooth, and virialised initial stellar distributions. However, the instant at which gas expulsion occurs is found to have a strong effect on cluster response to gas removal. We find if gas expulsion occurs prior to one crossing time, cluster response is poorly described by any global parameters. Furthermore in real clusters the instant of gas expulsion is poorly constrained. Therefore our results emphasis the highly stochastic and variable response of star clusters to gas expulsion.
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The early evolution of star clusters in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) has been the subject of significant recent controversy, particularly regarding the importance and length of the earliest, largely mass-independent disruption phase (referred to as infant mortality). Here, we take a fresh approach to the problem, using an independent, homogeneous data set of UBVR imaging observations, from which we obtain the SMCs cluster age and mass distributions in a self-consistent manner. We conclude that the (optically selected) SMC star cluster population has undergone at most ~30 per cent (1 sigma) infant mortality between the age range from about (3-10) Myr, to that of approximately (40-160) Myr. We rule out a 90 per cent cluster mortality rate per decade of age (for the full age range up to 10^9 yr) at a > 6 sigma level. We independently affirm this scenario based on the age distribution of the SMC cluster sample.
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