Comparative study between N-body and Fokker-Planck simulations for rotating star clusters - II. Two-component models

Abstract

To understand the effects of the initial rotation on the evolution of the tidally limited clusters with mass spectrum, we have performed N-body simulations of the clusters with different initial rotations and compared the results with those of the Fokker-Planck (FP) simulations. We confirmed that the cluster evolution is accelerated by not only the initial rotation but also the mass spectrum. For the slowly rotating models, the time evolutions of mass, energy and angularmomentum show good agreements between N-body and FP simulations. On the other hand, for the rapidly rotating models, there are significant differences between these two approaches at the early stage of the evolutions because of the development of bar instability in N-body simulations. The shape of the cluster for N-body simulations becomes tri-axial or even prolate, which cannot be produced by the two-dimensional FP simulations. The total angular momentum and the total mass of the cluster decrease rapidly while bar-like structure persists. After the rotational energy becomes smaller than the critical value for the bar instability, the shape of the cluster becomes nearly axisymmetric again, and follows the evolutionary track predicted by the FP equation. We have confirmed again that the energy equipartition is not completely achieved when M2/M1(m2/m1)3/2 > 0.16. By examining the angular momentum at each mass component, we found that the exchange of angular momentum between different mass components occurs, similar to the energy exchange leading to the equipartition. © 2013 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.