A comprehensive set of simulations of high-velocity collisions between main-sequence stars

Abstract

We report on a very large set of simulations of collisions between two main-sequence (MS) stars. These computations were carried out with the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method. Realistic stellar structure models for evolved MS stars were used. In order to sample an extended domain of initial parameters space (masses of the stars, relative velocity and impact parameter), more than 14000 simulations were carried out. We considered stellar masses ranging between 0.1 and 75 M⊙ and relative velocities up to a few thousand km s -1. To limit the computational burden, a resolution of 1000-32 000 particles per star was used. The primary goal of this study was to build a complete data base from which the result of any collision can be interpolated. This allows us to incorporate the effects of stellar collisions with an unprecedented level of realism into dynamical simulations of galactic nuclei and other dense stellar clusters. We make the data describing the initial condition and outcome (mass and energy loss, angle of deflection) of all our simulations available on the Internet. We find that the outcome of collisions depends sensitively on the stellar structure and that, in most cases, using polytropic models is inappropriate. Published fitting formulae for the collision outcomes, established from a limited set of collisions, prove of limited use because they do not allow robust extrapolation to other stellar structures or relative velocities. © 2005 RAS.