Dynamical evolution of star clusters in tidal fields

We report results of a large set of N-body calculations aimed to study the evolution of multi-mass star clusters in external tidal fields. Our clusters start with the same initial mass-functions, but varying particle numbers, orbital types and density profiles. Our main focus is to study how the stellar mass-function and other cluster parameters change under the combined influence of stellar evolution, two-body relaxation and the external tidal field. We find that the lifetimes of star clusters moving on similar orbits scale as T sim T_RH^x, where T_RH is the relaxation time, and the exponent x depends on the initial concentration of the cluster and is around x approx 0.75. From the results for the lifetimes,…