MSA-The Universe in a Computer

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Table of Contents

= The Universe in a Computer =

Gravity
Gravity is the weakest of all fundamental forces in physics, far weaker than electromagnetism or the so-called weak and strong interactions between subatomic particles. However, the other three forces lose out in the competition with gravity over long distances. The weak and strong interactions both have an intrinsically short range. Electromagnetism, while being long-range like gravity, suffers from a cancellation of attraction and repulsion in bulk matter, since there tend to be as almost exactly as many positive as negative charges in any sizable piece of matter. In contrast, gravitational interactions between particles are always attractive. Therefore, the more massive a piece of matter is, the more gravitational force it exerts on its surroundings.

This dominance of gravity at long distances simplifies the job of modeling a chunk of the Universe. To a first approximation, it is often a good idea to neglect the other forces, and to model the objects as if they were interacting only through gravity. In many cases, we can also neglect the intrinsic dimensions of the objects, treating each object as a point in space with a given mass. All this greatly simplifies the mathematical treatment of a system, by leaving out most of the physics and chemistry that would be needed in a more accurate treatment.

The objects we will be studying are stars, and the environment we will focus on are dense stellar systems, star clusters where the stars are so close together that they will occasionally collide and in general have frequent interesting and complex interactions. Some of the stars can take on rather extremely dense forms, like white dwarfs and neutron stars, and some stars may even collapse to form black holes. However, in first approximation we can treat all these different types of objects as point particles, as far as their gravitational interactions are concerned.

We lay the groundwork for modeling a system of stars. We start absolutely from scratch, with a most simple code of less than a page long. In many small steps we then improve that code, pointing out the many pitfalls along the way, on the level of programming as well as astrophysical understanding. We introduce helpful code development facilities and visualization tools and give many hints as to how to balance simplicity, efficiency, clarity, and modularity of the code. Our intention is to introduce the topic from square one, and then to work our way up to a robust set of codes with which one can do actual research. In later volumes in this series, we will continue to develop these codes, adding many useful diagnostic tools, and integrating those in a full production-level software environment.

Galactic Suburbia
Within the visible part of the universe, there are some hundred billion galaxies. Our galaxy is a rather typical spiral galaxy, one of those many billions, and within our galaxy, our sun is a star like any other among the hundred billion or so stars in our galaxy.

The sun is unremarkable in its properties. Its mass is in the mid range of what is normal for stars: there are others more than ten times more massive, and there are also stars more ten times less massive, but the vast majority of stars have a mass within a factor ten of that of the sun. Our home star is also unremarkable in its location, at a distance of some thirty thousand light years from the center of the galaxy. Again, the number of stars closer to the center and further away from the center are comparable. Our closest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, lies at a distance of a bit more than four light years.

This distance is typical for separations between stars in our neck of the woods. A light year is ten million times larger than the diameter of the sun (a million km, or three light seconds). In a scale model, if we would represent each star as a cherry, an inch across, the separation between the stars would be many hundreds of miles. It is clear from these numbers that collisions between stars in the solar neighborhood must be very rare. Although the stars follow random orbits without any traffic control, they present such tiny targets that we have to wait very long indeed in order to witness two of them crashing into each other. A quick estimate tells us that the sun has a chance of hitting another star of less than 10 -16 per year. In other words, we would have to wait at least 10 16 years to have an appreciable chance to witness such a collision. Given that the sun's age is less than five Gigayears, 5×10 -9 years, it is no surprise that it does not show any signs of a past collision: the chance that that would have happened was less than one in a million. Life in our galactic suburbs is really quite safe for a star.

There are other places in our galaxy that are far more crowded, and consequently are a lot more dangerous to venture into. We will have a brief look at four types of crowded neighborhoods: globular clusters, galactic nuclei, star forming regions, and open clusters.

Globular Clusters


In Fig. 1 we see a picture of the globular cluster M15, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. This cluster contains roughly a million stars. In the central region typical distances between neighboring stars are only a few hundredths of a light year, more than a hundred times smaller than those in the solar neighborhood. This implies a stellar density that is more than a million times larger than that near the sun. Since the typical relative velocities of stars in M15 are comparable to that of the sun and its neighbors, a few tens of km/sec, collision times scale with the density, leading to a central time between collisions of around 10 10 years. With globular clusters having an age of roughly 10 10 years, a typical star near the center has a significant chance to have undergone a collision in the past. To be a bit more precise, we don't know how long a typical star in the core has remained in its current environment, but even if such a star has been there only for a billion years, the chance of a collision has already been ~10%.

In fact, the chances are even higher than this rough estimate indicates. One reason is the stars spend some part of their life time in a much more extended state. A star like the sun increases its diameter by more than a factor of one hundred toward the end of its life, when they become a red giant. By presenting a much larger target to other stars, they increase their chance for a collision during this stage (even though this increase is partly offset by the fact that the red giant stage lasts shorter than the so-called main-sequence life time of a star, during which they have a normal appearance and diameter). The other reason is that many stars are part of a double star system, a type of dynamic spider web that can catch a third star, or another double star, into a temporarily bound three- or four-body system. Once engaged in such a tightly bound dance, the chance for collisions between the stars is greatly increased.

A detailed analysis of all these factors predicts that a significant fraction of stars in the core of a dense globular cluster such as M15 has already undergone at least one collision in its life time. This analysis, however, is quiet complex. To study all of the important channels through which collisions may occur, we have to analyze encounters between a great variety of single and double stars, and occasional bound triples and larger bound multiples of stars. Since each star in a bound subsystem can be a normal main-sequence star, a red giant, a white dwarf, a neutron star or even a black hole, as well as an exotic collision product itself, the combinatorial richness of flavors of double stars and triples is enormous. If we want to pick a particular double star, we not only have to choose a star type for each of its members, but in addition we have to specify the mass of each star, and the parameters of its orbit, such as the semi-major axis (a measure for the typical separation of the two stars) as well as the orbital eccentricity.



Galactic Nuclei


In Fig. 2 we see an image of the very center of our galaxy. This picture has been obtained with the Keck telescope, in a near infrared wavelength band.

In the very center of our galaxy, a black hole resides with a mass a few million times larger than the mass of our sun. Although the black hole itself is invisible, we can infer its presence by its strong gravitational field, which in turn is reflected in the speed with which stars pass near the black hole. In normal visible light it is impossible to get a glimpse of the galactic center, because of the obscuring gas clouds that are positioned between us and the center. Infrared light, however, can penetrate deeper in dusty regions.

In the central few light years near the black hole, the total mass of stars is comparable to the mass of the hole. This region is called the galactic nucleus. Here the stellar density is at least as large as that in the center of the densest globular clusters. However, due to the strong attraction of the black hole, the stars zip around at much higher velocities. Whereas a typical star in the core of M15 has a speed of a few tens of km/sec, stars near the black hole in the center of our galaxy move with speeds exceeding a 1000 km/sec. However, gravitational focusing is less by the same factor, and as a consequence, the frequency of stellar collisions is comparable.

Modeling the detailed behavior of stars in this region remains a great challenge, partly because of the complicated environmental features. A globular cluster forms a theorist's dream of a laboratory, with its absence of gas and dust and star forming regions. All we find there are stars that can be modeled well as point particles unless they come close and collide, after which we can apply the point particle approximation once again. In contrast, there are giant molecular clouds containing enormous amounts of gas and dust right close up to the galactic center. In these clouds, new stars are formed, some of which will soon afterwards end their life in brilliant supernova explosions, while spewing much of their debris back into the interstellar medium. Such complications are not present in globular clusters, where supernovae no longer occur since the member stars are too old and small to become a supernova.

Most other galaxies also harbor a massive black hole in their nuclei. Some of those have a mass of hundreds of millions of solar masses, or in extreme cases even more than a billion times the mass of the sun. The holy grail of the study of dense stellar systems is to perform and analyze accurate simulations of the complex ecology of stars and gas in the environment of such enormous holes in space. Much of the research on globular clusters can be seen as providing the initial steps toward a detailed modeling of galactic nuclei.



Star Forming Regions


There are many other places in the galactic disk where the density of stars is high enough to make collisions likely, at least temporarily. These are the sites where stars are born. Fig. 3, taken by the Japanese Subaru telescope in Hawaii shows the Orion Nebula, also known as M42, at a distance of 1500 light years from the sun. This picture, too, is taking in infrared light in order to penetrate the dusty regions surrounding the young stars. These stars all recently formed from the gas and dust that still surrounds them.

In order to study collisions in these star forming regions, we can no longer treat the stars are point masses. Many of the collisions take place while the stars are still in the process of forming, before they settle into their normal equilibrium state. While a protostar is still in the process of contracting from the gas cloud in which it was born, it presents a larger target for collisions with other stars. In addition, a single contracting gas cloud may fission, giving rise to more than one star at the same time. In this way, the correlated appearance of protostars is even more likely to lead to subsequent collisions.

The proper way to model these processes is to combine gas dynamics and stellar dynamics. Much progress has been made recently in this area. One way to use stellar dynamics in an approximate fashion is to begin with the output of the gas dynamics codes, which present the positions and velocities of a group of newly formed stars, and then to follow and analyze the motions of those stars, including their collisions.



Open Clusters


Although stars are formed in groups, these groups typically do not stay together for very long. Perturbations from other stars and gas clouds in their vicinity are often enough to break up the fragile gravitational hold they initially have over each other. Some of the more massive groups of newly formed stars, however, are tightly bound, enough to survive their environmental harassment. They form the so-called open clusters, where their name indicates that they have central densities that are typically less than what we see in globular clusters.

Fig. 4 shows one of the richest and densest open clusters, M67, as observed by the Anglo-Australian Observatory. Since this cluster is old enough to have lost its gas and dust, all stars are visible at normal optical wavelengths, at which this image is taken. In the central regions of this cluster, there are indications that some of the stars have undergone close encounters or even collisions. In particular, some of the so-called blue stragglers may be merger products. Consequently, this star cluster qualifies as a dense stellar system.

Open clusters typically have fewer members than globular clusters. Also, they are younger. Both facts makes it easier to simulate open clusters than globular clusters. On the other hand, the densest globular clusters show a higher frequency and a far richer variety of stellar collisions, making them a more interesting laboratory. In that sense, a dynamical simulation of an open cluster can be seen as providing preparatory steps toward the modeling of globular clusters, just as a study of the latter forms a stepping stone toward the investigation of galactic nuclei.



Writing your own star cluster simulator
Astronomers have half a century of experience in writing computer codes to simulate dense stellar systems. The first published results date back to 1960, and it was in the subsequent decade that it became clear just how tricky it was to simulate a group of interacting stars. The task seems so easy: for each star, just solve Newton's equations of motion (an object's acceleration is given by the applied force divided by the mass of the object) under the influence of the gravitational pairwise interactions of all other stars. Indeed, it is straightforward to write a simple code to do so, which integrates a rather simple differential equation, as we will see below. And as long as all stars remain fairly well separated from each other, even a simple code will do a reasonably good job. For historical reasons, this type of code is called an N-body code.

In practice, though, even a small group of stars will spontaneously form one or more double stars. This was discovered experimentally in the early sixties. One way to understand this result, after the fact, is from an energetic point of view. When a double star, or binary as they are generally called, is formed, energy has to be released. The reason is that the two stars in a binary are bound, which means that the total energy is negative, whereas two stars meeting each other after coming in from far away have a positive net energy. When three stars come together randomly, there is a chance that two of the three are left in a bound state, while the third one escapes, carrying the excess energy. Left by itself, a stellar system will exploit this energy liberation mechanism by spontaneously forming binaries.

As soon as even one binary appears, a simple code with constant time steps will give unacceptably large errors. The first modification needed is the introduction of an adaptive time step. In the simplest case, all particles will still share the same time step size, but that size will change in time, in order to adequately resolve the closest encounters between particles. However, even a single binary can then impose a tiny time step on the whole system, slowing everybody down.

By the end of the sixties, this problem was overcome by the development of codes that employed individual time steps. Stars with close neighbors were stepped forward in time more frequently than stars at large, and in this way the computational power was brought to where it was most needed.

This modification in itself brought gravitational N-body codes already well outside the range of systems that are normally discussed in text books on numerical integration methods. The internal book keeping needed to write a correct and efficient code with individual time steps is surprisingly large, given the simplicity of the task: integrate the effect of pairwise attractive inverse square forces, in order to solve the differential equations that constitute the equations of motion of classical Newtonian gravity.

However, introducing individual time steps was only a first step toward the development of modern N-body codes. The presence of tight binaries produced much more of an obstacle, and throughout the seventies a variety of clever mechanisms were developed in order to deal with them efficiently.

For one thing, there are problems with round-off. Two stars in a tight orbit around each other have almost the same position vector, as seen from the center of a star cluster, where we normally anchor the global coordinate system. And yet it is the separation between the stars that determines their mutual forces. When we compute the separation by subtracting two almost identical spatial vectors, we are asking for (numerical) trouble. The solution is to introduce a local coordinate system whenever two or more stars undergo a close interaction. This does away with the round-off problem, but it introduces a host of administrative complexities, in order to make sure that any arbitrary configuration of stars is locally presented correctly &mdash; and that the right thing happens when two or more of such local coordinate patches encounter each other. This may not happen often, but one occurrence in a long run is enough to cause an unacceptably large error if no precautions have been taken to deal properly with such a situation.

We can continue the list of tricks that have been invented to allow every larger and denser systems to be modeled correctly. We will encounter them later on, and explain them then in detail, but just to list a few, here are some of the techniques. Numerical problems with the singularity in the two-body system have been overcome by mapping two or more interacting stars from the three-dimensional Kepler problem to a four-dimensional harmonic oscillator. The total force on particles has been split into different contributions, the first from a near zone of relatively close neighbors and the second from a far zone of all other particles, with each partial force being governed with different integration time steps. Tree codes have been used to group the contributions of a number of more and more distant zones together in ever larger chunks, for efficiency. Triple stars have received their own special treatment, especially the marginally stable triples that are sometimes long-lived, but continuously changed their inner state due to internal perturbations. The list goes on. See Sverre Aarseth's book Gravitational N-Body Simulations

In this book, we will introduce a modern integrator, the Hermite scheme, developed in the 1990s, together with a variable time step integration scheme, where all stars share a common time step at any given time. Our emphasis will be on a complete explanation of all the steps involved, together with a discussion of the motivation for those steps. In the last few chapters, we will embark on a research project featuring stellar collisions, in a simple gravity-only approximation.

One of the roles of the current book is to provide an introduction to the Kali code, and the other software tools that are part of the Maya open lab. The Maya project will make it possible to simulate an entire star cluster.