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S. S. Kim (UCLA, Division of Astronomy)
Numerical simulations of the dynamical friction suffered by a star cluster near the Galactic center have been performed with a parallelized tree code, the Gadget. Dynamical friction, which causes a cluster to lose orbital energy and spiral in towards the galactic center, may explain the presence of a cluster of very young stars in the central parsec, where star formation is thought to be prohibitively difficult owing to strong tidal forces. The characteristics of dynamical friction have been well studied for galactic halos, where the positional distribution of field stars is relatively uniform and the velocity distribution can be assumed to be isotropic. However, not much is known about dynamical friction near galactic centers, where the background stellar density varies rapidly and the rotational velocity is important. Several million particles were used to represent the field stars, and the star cluster was realistically modeled with 100,000 particles. Simulations include cases for rotating field stars and non-circular initial cluster orbits.