Computing experiments on stellar systems

A stellar system being usually conceived, in a first approximation, as a group of point-like stars held together by their own gravitational mutual attraction, one may discriminate between three or four different lines of attack on the problem of the dynamical evolution of such a system. These are the straight-forward integration of the n- body problem, the statistical model description, the Monte Carlo technique, the Boltzmann moment approach. Direct numerical integration can now be applied to the dynamical evolution of star clusters containing up to 500 stars, which includes small to medium open stellar clusters, while statistical and Monte Carlo descriptions are better suited for systems of at least several thousand stars. The overall dynamic evolution of an isolated star cluster is characterized by the formation of a dense core surrounded by an extended halo, with some stars escaping with positive energy. This general feature has been confirmed in all the numerical experiments carried out in the last ten years. Further, the dependence of the escape rate from a stellar cluster on the mass spectrum of the member stars has been emphasized by dynamic theory as well as numerical experiments.