2,465 research outputs found
The evolution of the Sun's birth cluster and the search for the solar siblings with Gaia
We use self-consistent numerical simulations of the evolution and disruption
of the Sun's birth cluster in the Milky Way potential to investigate the
present-day phase space distribution of the Sun's siblings. The simulations
include the gravitational N-body forces within the cluster and the effects of
stellar evolution on the cluster population. In addition the gravitational
forces due to the Milky Way potential are accounted for in a self-consistent
manner. Our aim is to understand how the astrometric and radial velocity data
from the Gaia mission can be used to pre-select solar sibling candidates. We
vary the initial conditions of the Sun's birth cluster, as well as the
parameters of the Galactic potential. We show that the disruption time-scales
of the cluster are insensitive to the details of the non-axisymmetric
components of the Milky Way model and we make predictions, averaged over the
different simulated possibilities, about the number of solar siblings that
should appear in surveys such as Gaia or GALAH. We find a large variety of
present-day phase space distributions of solar siblings, which depend on the
cluster initial conditions and the Milky Way model parameters. We show that
nevertheless robust predictions can be made about the location of the solar
siblings in the space of parallaxes (), proper motions () and
radial velocities (). By calculating the ratio of the number of
simulated solar siblings to that of the number of stars in a model Galactic
disk, we find that this ratio is above 0.5 in the region given by: mas, masyr, and kms. Selecting stars from this region should increase the probability
of success in identifying solar siblings through follow up observations
[Abridged].Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA
Face-on accretion onto a protoplanetary disc
Globular clusters (GCs) are known to harbor multiple stellar populations. To
explain these observations Bastian et al. suggested a scenario in which a
second population is formed by the accretion of enriched material onto the
low-mass stars in the initial GC population. The idea is that the low-mass,
pre-main sequence stars sweep up gas expelled by the massive stars of the same
generation into their protoplanetary disc as they move through the GC core. We
perform simulations with 2 different smoothed particle hydrodynamics codes to
investigate if a low-mass star surrounded by a protoplanetary disc can accrete
the amount of enriched material required in this scenario. We focus on the gas
loading rate onto the disc and star as well as on the lifetime of the disc. We
find that the gas loading rate is a factor of 2 smaller than the geometric
rate, because the effective cross section of the disc is smaller than its
surface area. The loading rate is consistent for both codes, irrespective of
resolution. The disc gains mass in the high resolution runs, but loses angular
momentum on a time scale of 10^4 yrs. Two effects determine the loss of
(specific) angular momentum in our simulations: 1) continuous ram pressure
stripping and 2) accretion of material with no azimuthal angular momentum. Our
study and previous work suggest that the former, dominant process is mainly
caused by numerical rather than physical effects, while the latter is not. The
latter process causes the disc to become more compact, increasing the surface
density profile at smaller radii. The disc size is determined in the first
place by the ram pressure when the flow first hits the disc. Further evolution
is governed by the decrease in the specific angular momentum of the disc. We
conclude that the size and lifetime of the disc are probably not sufficient to
accrete the amount of mass required in Bastian et al.'s scenario.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A, 15 pages, 5 figures, 4 table
A note on polynomially growing C-0-semigroups
We characterize polynomial growth of a -semigroup in terms of the first power of the resolvent of its generator. We do this for a class of semigroups which includes -semigroups on Hilbert spaces and analytic semigroups on Banach spaces. Furthermore, we characterize polynomial growth for discrete semigroups
Demand for wool by grade
The aims of the project were to examine the relationships between auction
prices of different types of wool, to identify categories of wool and to investigate substitution effects amongst wools. A modelling framework was developed which enabled these relationships to be analysed. While there are some clear avenues for further research, this study makes some useful first steps towards a conceptualisation of wool markets
Monte-Carlo Simulations of Globular Cluster Evolution - I. Method and Test Calculations
We present a new parallel supercomputer implementation of the Monte-Carlo
method for simulating the dynamical evolution of globular star clusters. Our
method is based on a modified version of Henon's Monte-Carlo algorithm for
solving the Fokker-Planck equation. Our code allows us to follow the evolution
of a cluster containing up to 5x10^5 stars to core collapse in < 40 hours of
computing time. In this paper we present the results of test calculations for
clusters with equal-mass stars, starting from both Plummer and King model
initial conditions. We consider isolated as well as tidally truncated clusters.
Our results are compared to those obtained from approximate, self-similar
analytic solutions, from direct numerical integrations of the Fokker-Planck
equation, and from direct N-body integrations performed on a GRAPE-4
special-purpose computer with N=16384. In all cases we find excellent agreement
with other methods, establishing our new code as a robust tool for the
numerical study of globular cluster dynamics using a realistic number of stars.Comment: 35 pages, including 8 figures, submitted to ApJ. Revised versio
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