title: The Secret Lives of Young Massive Star Clusters
creator: Polak, Brooke
subject: ddc-520
subject: 520 Astronomy and allied sciences
description: Many aspects of star cluster formation and evolution are unconstrained. This thesis presents models of star cluster formation — including gas and stellar dynamics, sub-grid star formation, stellar evolution, and stellar feedback — from turbulent gas clouds of initial mass 10⁴, 10⁵, and 10⁶ M⊙. The latter is one of the largest star-by-star cluster models to date and has provided many new insights into the formation and early evolutionary properties of young massive star clusters. First, I examine the global properties of each cloud, particularly noting the high star formation efficiency. In sufficiently dense and massive clus- ters, stellar feedback is unable to quench star formation as gravity overpowers it. Next, I identify a novel mechanism for the production of runaway stars in young clusters, the sub-cluster ejection scenario, in which a subset of stars in an infalling sub-cluster are ejected by a tidal interaction with the assembling cluster’s center of mass. Lastly, I analyze the presence of dynamical mass segregation in the models, where massive stars are more centrally clustered than low-mass stars. These models have no primordial mass segregation by construction. Young clusters can undergo early dynamical mass segregation during core collapse when the crossing time is substantially reduced.
date: 2024
type: Dissertation
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/35490/1/thesis-BrookePolak.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00035490
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-354903
identifier:   Polak, Brooke  (2024) The Secret Lives of Young Massive Star Clusters.  [Dissertation]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/35490/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng