Monte-Carlo Simulations of Star Clusters I. First Results

Abstract

A revision of Stodolkiewicz's Monte-Carlo code is used to simulate evolution of star clusters. The new method treats each superstar as a single star and follows the evolution and motion of all individual stellar objects. The first calculations for isolated, equal-mass N-body systems with three-body energy generation according to Spitzer's formulae show good agreement with direct N-body calculations for N=2000, 4096 and 10000 particles. The density, velocity, mass distributions, energy generation, number of binaries etc. follow the N-body results. Only the number of escapers is slightly too high compared to N-body results and there is no level off anisotropy for advanced post-collapse evolution of Monte-Carlo models as is seen in N-body simulations for N < 2000. For simulations with N > 10000 gravothermal oscillations are clearly visible. The calculations of N=2000, 4096, 10000, 32000 and 100000 models take about 2, 6, 20, 130 and 2500 hours, respectively. The Monte-Carlo code is at least 10^5 times faster than the N-body one for N=32768 with special-purpose hardware (Makino 1996ab). Thus it becomes possible to run several different models to improve statistical quality of the data and run individual models with N as large as 100000. The Monte-Carlo scheme can be regarded as a method which lies in the middle between direct N-body and Fokker-Planck models and combines most advantages of both methods.