Globular Cluster Formation in Mergers

Simple item page
dc.creatorSchweizer, Francois
dc.date2006-06-01
dc.date.accessioned2026-07-07T07:12:06Z
dc.date.available2026-07-07T07:12:06Z
dc.descriptionMergers of gas-rich galaxies lead to gravitationally driven increases in gas pressure that can trigger intense bursts of star and cluster formation. Although star formation itself is clustered, most newborn stellar aggregates are unbound associations and disperse. Gravitationally bound star clusters that survive for at least 10-20 internal crossing times (~20-40 Myr) are relatively rare and seem to contain <10% of all stars formed in the starbursts. The most massive young globular clusters formed in present-day mergers exceed omega Cen by an order of magnitude in mass, yet appear to have normal stellar initial mass functions. In the local universe, recent remnants of major gas-rich disk mergers appear as protoelliptical galaxies with subpopulations of typically 100-1000 young metal-rich globular clusters in their halos. The evidence is now strong that these "second-generation" globular clusters formed from giant molecular clouds in the merging disks, squeezed into collapse by large-scale shocks and high gas pressure rather than by high-velocity cloud-cloud collisions. Similarly, first- generation metal-poor globular clusters may have formed during cosmological reionization from low-metallicity giant molecular clouds squeezed by the universal reionization pressure.
dc.description8 pages, LaTeX, 2 figures (low-resolution EPS); uses svmult.cls, svind.ist, and svmultphys.clo. To appear in "Globular Clusters -- Guides to Galaxies," eds. T. Richtler and S. Larsen (Springer, New York), 2006
dc.identifierhttps://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0606036
dc.identifierhttp://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0606036
dc.identifier.urihttp://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/111966
dc.subjectAstrophysics
dc.titleGlobular Cluster Formation in Mergers
dc.typetext

Files

Collections

arXiv