Abstract
Stellar dynamics is almost unreasonably well suited for an implementation in terms of special-purpose hardware. Unlike the case of molecular dynamics, stellar dynamics deals exclusively with a long-range force, gravity, which leads to a computational cost scaling as the square of the number of stars involved. While special tricks can lead to a reduction of this cost from N N2 to N log N in the case of very large particle numbers, such tricks are not suitable for all areas within stellar dynamics. When a stellar system is close to equilibrium, and has a very high density, it still pays to compute all interactions on a star by star basis, even for N = 105. Any cN log N approach would either gloss over the subtle net effects of near-canceling interactions, driving the evolution of such a system, or would carry a prohibitively large coefficient c. This paper presents a brief introduction to the stellar dynamics of dense stellar systems, aimed at researchers using special purpose computers in other branches of physics.
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Hut, P. (2001). Stellar Dynamics of Dense Stellar Systems. In: Ebisuzaki, T., Makino, J. (eds) New Horizons of Computational Science. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 263. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0864-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0864-8_4
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