The Disruption of Globular Star Clusters in the Galaxy: A Comparative Analysisbetween Fokker-Planck and [ITAL]N[/ITAL]-Body Models

Abstract

Recent N-body simulations have shown that there is a serious discrepancy between the results of the N-body simulations and the results of Fokker-Planck simulations for the evolution of globular and rich open clusters under the influence of the galactic tidal field. In some cases, the lifetime obtained by Fokker-Planck calculations is more than an order of magnitude smaller than those by N-body simulations. In this letter we show that the principal cause for this discrepancy is an over-simplified treatment of the tidal field used in previous Fokker-Planck simulations. We performed new Fokker-Planck calculations using a more appropriate implementation of the boundary condition of the tidal field. The implementation is only possible with anisotropic Fokker-Planck models, while all previous Fokker-Planck calculations rely on the assumption of isotropy. Our new Fokker-Planck results agree well with N-body results. Comparison of the two types of simulations gives a better understanding of the cluster evolution.