Poster Presentation Astronomical Society of Australia Annual Scientific Meeting including HWWS 2013

Stars on the run: escaping from stellar clusters (#250)

Guido Moyano Loyola 1 , Jarrod Hurley 1
  1. Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia
It is believed that most stars are born in stellar clusters, which dissolve over time so that the members become part of the disc and halo population of the Galaxy. 
In the present work we will assume that these young stellar clusters live mainly within the disc of the Galaxy. We have explored four different primordial binary percentages: 0%, 10% and 50%. We have quantified the contribution of these escaping stars to the Galaxy population by analysing their escape velocity and evolutionary stage at the moment of escape. In this way we could analyse the mechanisms that produced these escapers, whether evaporation through weak two-body encounters, energetic close encounters or stellar evolution events, e.g. supernovae.
We could also infer that dissolving stellar clusters such as those that we have modeled can populate the Galactic halo with giants stars for which the progenitors were stars of up to 2.4 M⊙. Furthermore, choices made for the velocity kicks of remnants do influence the production of hyper-velocity stars.