Dependency of dynamical ejections of O stars on the masses of very young star clusters

Abstract

Massive stars can be efficiently ejected from their birth clusters through encounters with other massive stars. We study how the dynamical ejection fraction of O star systems varies with the masses of very young star clusters, Mecl, by means of direct N -body calculations. We include diverse initial conditions by varying the half-mass radius, initial mass-segregation, initial binary fraction and orbital parameters of the massive binaries. The results show robustly that the ejection fraction of O star systems exhibits a maximum at a cluster mass of $10^{3.5}$ Msun for all models, even though the number of the ejected systems increases with cluster mass. We show that lower mass clusters (Mecl ~ 400 Msun ) are the dominant sources for populating the Galactic field with O stars by dynamical ejections, considering the mass function of embedded clusters. About 15 per cent (up to 38 per cent, depending on the cluster models) of O stars of which a significant fraction are binaries, and which would have formed in a 10 Myr epoch of star formation in a distribution of embedded clusters, will be dynamically ejected to the field. Individual clusters may eject 100 per cent of their original O star content. A large fraction of such O stars have velocities up to only 10 km/s. Synthesising a young star cluster mass function it follows, given the stellar-dynamical results presented here, that the observed fractions of field and runaway O stars, and the binary fractions among them can be well understood theoretically if all O stars form in embedded clusters.