Far-Ultraviolet Surveys of Globular Clusters: Hunting for the Products of Stellar Collisions and Near Misses
Abstract
Description
Globular clusters are gravitationally bound stellar systems containing on the order of 100,000 stars. Due to the high stellar densities in the cores of these clusters, close encounters and even physical collisions between stars are inevitable. These dynamical interactions can produce exotic types of single and binary stars that are extremely rare in the galactic field, but which may be important to the dynamical evolution of their host clusters. A common feature of these dynamically-formed stellar populations is that many of their members are relatively hot, and thus bright in the far-ultraviolet (FUV) waveband. In this short review, I describe how space-based FUV observations are being used to find and study these populations.
15 pages, 6 figures; invited "Brief Review" for Modern Physics Letters A
15 pages, 6 figures; invited "Brief Review" for Modern Physics Letters A