Young stellar clusters in interacting galaxies
C. Boily
Star clusters have for decades been modelled from the point of view of
point sources
evolving under their own gravity. Not anymore. The game of
gravitational dynamics
has peaked in the mid-1990s when Makino confirmed with N-body
integration that
stellar clusters can be describe as thermodynamical systems. A new wave
of stellar
dynamics has rapidly established around 2001 that the coupling of
stellar evolution and
dynamics is essential to inderstand the complex interplay between
internal cluster
dynamics, mass loss through stellar evolution, and the surrounding
starburts galaxy - in the case when clusters form in a merging galaxy,
for example. I retrace some steps
and classic results before launching into more recent work integrating
stellar evolution
into the picture. I focus only on the simpler cases of single stars but
highlight some
exciting results derived for binary stars in the last year or so.