AAS 196th Meeting, June 2000
Session 41. Globular Clusters
Display, Wednesday, June 7, 2000, 10:00am-7:00pm, Empire Hall South

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[41.11] Mass Segregation and Evaporation in Globular Star Clusters

J. M. Fregeau, K. J. Joshi, S. Portegies Zwart, F. A. Rasio (MIT)

Using our recently developed dynamical Monte-Carlo code, we study the segregation or evaporation of a tracer stellar population with individual masses m2 against a background population with individual masses m1. We consider both light tracers (\mu \equiv m2/m1 < 1) and heavy tracers (\mu > 1), and use King and Plummer model initial conditions. In all our simulations we use 105 stars and ignore the effects of binaries and stellar evolution. For tidally truncated King models with very light tracers (\mu \lesssim 10-2) we find, by core collapse, a depletion of tracers in the core and an enhancement in the halo. For some initial conditions the final tracer number density in the halo is greater than the initial tracer number density. We discuss the implications of these results for the evolution of planets and brown dwarfs in globular clusters. For heavy tracers, we find that the characteristic time to sink into the core goes like 1/\mu, as predicted by simple theoretical arguments (Spitzer, 1969). This work was supported by NSF and NASA.


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