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Mass evaporation rate of globular clusters in a strong tidal field

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posted on 2024-07-26, 14:27 authored by Juan P. Madrid, Nathan W.C. Leigh, Jarrod HurleyJarrod Hurley, Mirek Giersz
The mass evaporation rate of globular clusters evolving in a strong Galactic tidal field is derived through the analysis of large, multimass N-body simulations. For comparison, we also study the same evaporation rates using MOCCA Monte Carlo models for globular cluster evolution. Our results show that the mass evaporation rate is a dynamical value, that is, far from a constant single number found in earlier analytical work and commonly used in the literature. Moreover, the evaporation rate derived with these simulations is higher than values previously published. These models also show that the value of the mass evaporation rate depends on the strength of the tidal field. We give an analytical estimate of the mass evaporation rate as a function of time and galactocentric distance ξ(RGC, t). Upon extrapolating this formula to smaller RGC values, our results provide tentative evidence for a very high ξ value at small RGC. Our results suggest that the corresponding mass-loss in the inner Galactic potential could be high and it should be accounted for when star clusters pass within it. This has direct relevance to nuclear cluster formation/growth via the infall of globular clusters through dynamical friction. As an illustrative example, we estimate how the evaporation rate increases for an ~10 5 M ⊙ globular cluster that decays through dynamical friction into the Galactic Centre. We discuss the findings of this work in relation to the formation of nuclear star clusters by inspiralling globular clusters.

Funding

Massive black holes in dense star clusters

Australian Research Council

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ISSN

1365-2966

Journal title

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Volume

470

Issue

2

Pagination

8 pp

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Copyright statement

This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ©: 2017 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.”

Language

eng

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