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Título
:
On the Evaporation of Globular Clusters
Conferencista:
Georges Meylan, ESO-Garching
Data
:
Sexta-Feira, 23/03/01 15H30M
Local
:
Auditório L.B.F. Clauzet - Água Funda
Sumário
:
Galactic globular clusters, which are ancient building blocks of our
Galaxy, represent a very interesting family of stellar systems in which some
fundamental dynamical processes have taken place on time scales shorter than
the age of the Universe. In contrast with galaxies, these clusters represent
unique laboratories for learning about two-body relaxation, mass segregation
from equipartition of energy, stellar collisions, stellar mergers, and core
collapse. All these phenomena, combined with the effects of disk and bulge
crossing suffered by each globular cluster along its orbital path, favor the
regular escape of stars from these stellar systems, leading to their slow
evaporation. I shall present recent observational results which confirm the
fact that globular clusters are not the everlasting swarm of stars that, not
so long ago, we thought they were.