Depletion of Giant Stars in the Galactic Nucleus due to a Top Heavy Mass Function

Details Depletion of Giant Stars in the Galactic Nucleus due to a Top Heavy Mass Function Depletion of Giant Stars in the Galactic Nucleus due to a Top Heavy Mass Function

Jan 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21724113j&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #217, #241.13; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Using the direct Fokker-Planck method we have studied the effect of a top-heavy mass function on the depletion of post-main sequence stars in the Galactic Nucleus. Beginning with the standard Kroupa mass function, with stellar masses ranging from 0.1 to 50 solar masses, we ran a series of models with progressively flatter IMF slopes. Our top-heavy mass function had an approximate power-law slope of 2, with the Salpeter IMF slope being -1.35. With this top-heavy mass function, black holes outnumbered lower main sequence stars by a factor of 1000. We found that despite a top-heavy IMF, post-main sequence stars kept the same homologous profiles and underwent no more depletion than the standard Kroupa IMF. This implies that the most likely scenario for post-main sequence depletion is not pre-emptive destruction of main sequence stars by stellar mass black holes, but rather tidal disruptions due to the central supermassive black hole as found by Geiss et al. (2009). This project was funded in part by a grant from the Butler Institute for Research and Scholarship.

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