Explore · interactive
Mass segregation
Young clusters are often born already segregated — the most massive stars sit deepest, where the gas was densest. One knob, , sets how tightly a star's mass is tied to the density of the cell it forms in. Slide it up and watch the big blue stars migrate to the core.
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drag to rotate · scroll to zoom · ←/→ steps the coupling · F fullscreen
Nothing here is choreographed. The star positions and the gas are fixed; only changes which star lands in each position, via the same rank-coupling (McLuster Eq. A1) thatprogenax uses to build segregated initial conditions. At the most massive stars take the densest gas; at the pairing is random. The 6,557 stars re-pair in your browser as you drag.
One caveat about this realization. Its star positions come from the gas grid rather than from a continuous profile: the6,557 stars occupy only 139 distinct cells of 0.047 pc, and the densest single cell holds 7,973 of them. So the density each star couples to takes only 139 distinct values, and the maximum is shared by more than three-quarters of the cluster — the coupling is real and so is the re-pairing you are driving, but it is sorting stars among 139 density levels, not a continuous field, and “the densest cell” is not a single star's prize. The clumps you can see are those cells. Fixing it means changing howprogenax places stars within a cell, which is upstream of this page.