Perturbed stellar motion in dense star clusters

Pavlík, Václav

Star clusters are thought to be the birthplaces of stars as well as the building blocks of galaxies. They typically consist of thousands to millions of stars bound together by self-gravity. These systems evolve on the scale of Myr to Gyr, there- fore, it is impossible for us to see any change in their global evolution even within hundreds of human lifetimes. Although the equations of motion of stars in a star cluster are simple New- tonian, it is impossible to predict precisely history of any star within them to any point in the future. Therefore, we may either compare the observations of different star clusters at different age, we may invent theoretical approaches and analytical predictions, or we must follow their evolution numerically (e.g. with direct N-body integrators) which is the main focus of my research and this thesis. First, we follow the evolution of star clusters in general while coming up with a novel method to estimate their characteristic timescale (i.e. the time of core collapse) based on global parameters. The core collapse is directly linked to the formation of hard binary stars, thus, we focus on their analysis as well. We also follow several recent observational results: (i) ALMA observations of the Serpens South star-forming region indicate that star clusters are born mass...

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