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May 20 at Noon in the 2nd Floor Conference Room in Dearborn Speaker: Evert Gelbbeek (McMaster University) “Modelling the evolution of stellar collision runaways” Repeated collisions between one single object and individual stars may occur in young dense star clusters. The merger remnants of these so- called collision runaways may be very massive (several 100 Msun) stars and have been speculated to form a possible formation channel for intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs). Whether IMBHs can indeed form through this scenario depends strongly on the stellar evolution of the merger remnant and in particular the choices that are made for the highly uncertain mass loss rates. We used existing N-body calculations to provide us with the collision times and stellar masses for three merger sequences. We then followed the evolution of the collision product and estimate the final black hole mass as well as the chemical yields. In this talk I will summarise this work and discuss in particular the constraints and uncertainties due to the choices that were made for the mass loss prescriptions and how these choices might be improved in future work. |