Simulating the tidal disruption of the Hyades cluster stellar streams

Previous studies have used n-body simulations to model the Hyades open cluster in an attempt to determine the initial conditions of the progenitor globular cluster at the time of its formation. In this thesis, we perform new simulation of the evolution of the Hyades using up-to-date information of its stream members using GAIA data release 2 (GAIA DR2) data. Our simulations were performed in a gravitational background potential with a co-evolving halo potential based in cosmological simulations and a static disk potential, using NBODY6++ code to compute the interactions between stars in the cluster and the gravitational background. This study produced several simulations of stellar streams with similar morphology to the observed Hyades cluster. We have performed a large grid of simulations that span a reasonable amount of the parameter space that may described the initial conditions of the Hyades star cluster, comparing final-day mass profile and morphology of the simulated streams with those of the observed stream to conclude that the Hyades’ progenitor cluster likely had an initial mass of between 1400–1600 M⊙ and an initial half-mass radius of between 4–6 pc. We found the initial position and velocity vectors of the cluster that would have resulted in its current-day position and velocity for all simulations in the parameter space, and we observed the effects of varying the mass and half-mass radius of the initial cluster on the final-day mass profile and morphology. We also performed additional tests to observe the impact of the external dark matter halo in the evolution of the star cluster.Astro 9