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Photograph of Ross Church

Ross Church

Senior lecturer

Photograph of Ross Church

The young stellar clusters in M51 and the impact of GMC encounters

Author

  • Timmi G. Jørgensen
  • Ross P. Church

Summary, in English

We investigate the young stellar cluster population of M51 and how it is affected by encounters with giant molecular clouds (GMCs). We combine a galactic model with N-body simulations of 5000 unique clusters in the mass range [600-24000] M⊙. We simulate each cluster twice: with (CR) and without (CN) tidal perturbations from the GMCs. We are able to reproduce the majority of the observed mass- and age functions. However, for the age function, we see a large discrepancy for clusters with masses ~5000 M⊙, which is likely related to incompleteness in the observations. We find that old low-mass clusters, located close to the galactic centre, are most likely to be disrupted. The effect of GMC encounters causes a decrease in survivability by 8 per cent points for the oldest clusters with initial masses below 6000 M⊙. For 15 clusters, we find that the presence of GMCs can protect the CR clusters from the rest of the galactic tidal field and thereby cause them to retain a significantly higher fraction of stars compared to the CN clusters. For clusters that are supervirialized, we find that the CR clusters have a higher virial ratio compared to the CN clusters, which is a result of interactions with GMCs. We see no significant difference between the CR and CN populations, indicating that over a time period of 200 Myr the effect of the GMCs cannot be detected.

Department/s

  • Astrophysics
  • eSSENCE: The e-Science Collaboration

Publishing year

2025-10

Language

English

Pages

1410-1428

Publication/Series

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Volume

543

Issue

2

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Topic

  • Astronomy, Astrophysics and Cosmology

Keywords

  • galaxies: individual: M51, NGC 5194
  • galaxies: kinematics and dynamics
  • galaxies: star clusters: general

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0035-8711