Very massive stars in not so massive clusters
Seungkyung Oh, Pavel Kroupa

TL;DR
This study investigates how dynamical stellar collisions in young star clusters can produce stars more massive than predicted by the m_max-M_ecl relation, explaining observed outliers like VVV CL041.
Contribution
The paper demonstrates through N-body simulations that dynamical processes can create very massive stars, challenging the notion that the m_max-M_ecl relation is strictly universal at birth.
Findings
8% of simulated clusters form stars >80 Msun via collisions
More than half of clusters host a merger product as the most massive star within 5 Myr
Dynamical evolution can explain outliers like VVV CL041
Abstract
Very young star clusters in the Milky Way exhibit a well-defined relation between their maximum stellar mass, m_max, and their mass in stars, M_ecl. A recent study shows that the young intermediate-mass star cluster VVV CL041 possibly hosts a >80 Msun star, WR62-2, which appears to violate the existence of the m_max-M_ecl relation since the mass of the star is almost two times higher than that expected from the relation. By performing direct N-body calculations with the same mass as the cluster VVV CL041 (3000 Msun), we study whether such a very massive star can be formed via dynamically induced stellar collisions in a binary-rich star cluster that initially follows the m_max-M_ecl relation. Eight out of 100 clusters form a star more massive than 80 Msun through multiple stellar collisions. This suggests that the VVV CL041 cluster may have become an outlier of the relation because of…
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