Non-resonant relaxation of rotating globular clusters

Abstract

The long-term relaxation of rotating, spherically symmetric globular clusters is investigated through an extension of the orbit-averaged Chandrasekhar non-resonant formalism. A comparison is made with the long-term evolution of the distribution function in action space, measured from averages of sets of N-body simulations up to core collapse. The impact of rotation on in-plane relaxation is found to be weak. In addition, we observe a clear match between theoretical predictions and N-body measurements. For the class of rotating models considered, we find no strong gravo-gyro catastrophe accelerating core collapse. Both kinetic theory and simulations predict a reshuffling of orbital inclinations from overpopulated regions to underpopulated ones. This trend accelerates as the amount of rotation is increased. Yet, for orbits closer to the rotational plane, the non-resonant prediction does not reproduce numerical measurements. We argue that this mismatch stems from these orbits’ coherent interactions, which are not captured by the non-resonant formalism that only addresses local deflections.