Stellar interactions in dense and sparse star clusters

Context. Stellar encounters potentially affect the evolution of the protoplanetary discs in the Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC). However, the role of encounters in other cluster environments is less known.
Aims: We investigate the effect of the encounter-induced disc-mass loss in different cluster environments.
Methods: Starting from an ONC-like cluster we vary the cluster size and density to determine the correlation of the collision time scale and disc-mass loss. We use the nbody6++ code to model the dynamics of these clusters and analyse the disc-mass loss due to encounters.
Results: We find that the encounter rate strongly depends on the cluster density but remains rather unaffected by the size of the stellar population. This dependency translates directly into the effect on the encounter-induced disc-mass loss. The essential outcome of the simulations are: i) even in clusters of four times lower density than the ONC, the effect of encounters is still apparent; ii) the density of the ONC itself marks a threshold: in less dense and less massive clusters it is the massive stars that dominate the encounter-induced disc-mass loss, whereas in denser and more massive clusters the low-mass stars play the major role for the disc-mass removal.
Conclusions: It seems that in the central regions of young dense star clusters - the common sites of star formation - stellar encounters do affect the evolution of the protoplanetary discs. With higher cluster density low-mass stars become more heavily involved in this process. These results can also be applied to extreme stellar systems: in the case of the Arches cluster one would expect stellar encounters to destroy the discs of most of the low- and high-mass stars in several hundred thousand years, whereas intermediate mass stars are able to retain their discs to some extent even under these harsh environmental conditions.