Paper detail

Evolution of Tidally Truncated Globular Clusters with Anisotropy

The evolution of tidally truncated globular clusters is investigated by integrating two-dimensional Fokker-Planck equation that allows the development of velocity anisotropy. We start from the isotropic Plummer model with tidal cut off and followed the evolution through the corecollapse. The heating by three-binary is included to obtain the evolution past the corecollapse. The anisotropy in velocity dispersion develops during the precollapse evolution. However, the anisotropy becomes highly depressed during the post-collapse evolution because of rapid loss of radial orbits. Maximum radial anisotropy appears just after the beginning of the expansion, and degree of anisotropy decreases slowly as the total mass of the cluster decreases. Thus it may be possible to determine the evolutionary status of a cluster if the velocity anisotropy can be measured in the sense that the postcollapse clusters always have very little degree of anisotropy. The structure of the post-collapse cluster can be well fitted to King models because the degree of anisotropy is rather small.