Modeling Stellar Collisions in Galactic Nuclei Using Hydrodynamic Simulations and Machine Learning

Abstract Nuclear star clusters represent some of the most extreme collisional environments in the Universe. A nuclear star cluster like that of the Milky Way harbors a supermassive black hole at its center, which accelerates stars to high speeds (≳100–1000 km s −1 ) in a region where millions of other stars reside. Direct collisions occur in such high-density environments, where they can shape the stellar populations and influence the evolution of the cluster. We present a suite of a couple hundred high-resolution smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of collisions between 1 M ⊙ stars, at impact speeds representative of galactic nuclei. We use our SPH dataset to develop physically motivated fitting formulae for predicting collision outcomes. While collision-driven mass loss has been examined in detail in the literature, we present a new framework for understanding the effects of “hit-and-run” collisions on a star’s trajectory. We demonstrate that the change in stellar velocity follows the tidal-dissipation limit for grazing encounters, while the deflection angle is well-approximated by point-particle dynamics for periapses ≳0.3 times the stellar radii. We use our SPH dataset to test two machine learning (ML) algorithms, k-nearest neighbors and neural networks, for predicting collision outcomes. We find that the neural network outperforms k-nearest neighbors and delivers results on par with and in some cases exceeding the accuracy of our fitting formulae. We conclude that both fitting formulae and ML have merits for modeling collisions in dense stellar environments; however, ML may prove more effective as the parameter space of initial conditions expands.