Journal article
Resonant relaxation in globular clusters
- Abstract:
- Resonant relaxation has been discussed as an efficient process that changes the angular momenta of stars orbiting around a central supermassive black hole due to the fluctuating gravitational field of the stellar cluster. Other spherical stellar systems, such as globular clusters, exhibit a restricted form of this effect where enhanced relaxation rate only occurs in the directions of the angular momentum vectors, but not in their magnitudes; this is called vector resonant relaxation (VRR). To explore this effect, we performed a large set of direct N-body simulations, with up to 512k particles (where k =1024) and ~500 dynamical times. Contrasting these simulations, which naturally include the collective effects, with Spitzer-style Monte Carlo simulations, which by design only exhibit two-body relaxation, we show that the temporal behavior of the angular momentum vectors in N-body simulations cannot be explained by two-body relaxation alone. VRR operates efficiently in globular clusters with N > 104. The fact that VRR operates in globular clusters may open a way to use powerful tools in statistical physics for their description. In particular, since the distribution of orbital planes relaxes much more rapidly than the distribution of the magnitude of angular momentum and the radial action, the relaxation process reaches an internal statistical equilibrium in the corresponding part of phase space while the whole cluster is generally out of equilibrium, in a state of quenched disorder. We point out the need to include effects of VRR in Monte Carlo simulations of globular clusters.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Accepted manuscript, 961.9KB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.3847/1538-4357/ab1b32
Authors
- Publisher:
- IOP Publishing
- Journal:
- Astrophysical Journal More from this journal
- Volume:
- 878
- Issue:
- 2
- Article number:
- 138
- Publication date:
- 2019-06-21
- Acceptance date:
- 2019-04-18
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1538-4357
- ISSN:
-
0004-637X
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1128019
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1128019
- Deposit date:
-
2020-08-24
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- American Astronomical Society
- Copyright date:
- 2019
- Rights statement:
- © 2019 The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.
- Notes:
- This is the accepted manuscript version of the article. The final version is available online from IOP Publishing at: https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ab1b32
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record