2008/03/04 by Michael Marks, Pavel Kroupa, Holger Baumgardt · 5 citations
Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Educational Leadership and Practices #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.13165.x
accepted for publication in MNRAS, 10 pages, 6 figures
arxiv created 2008/03/04 · openalex publication_date 2008/04/30 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recently de Marchi, Paresce & Pulone (2007) studied a sample of twenty globular clusters and found that all clusters with high concentrations have steep stellar mass-functions while clusters with low concentration have comparatively shallow mass-functions. No globular clusters were found with a flat mass-function and high concentration. This seems curious since more concentrated star clusters are believed to be dynamically more evolved and should have lost more low-mass stars via evaporation, which would result in a shallower mass-function in the low-mass part. We show that this effect can be explained by residual-gas expulsion from initially mass-segregated star clusters, and is enhanced further through unresolved binaries. If gas expulsion is the correct mechanism to produce the observed trend, then observation of these parameters would allow to constrain cluster starting conditions such as star formation efficiency and the time-scale of gas expulsion.