Compressive Effects on Globular Clusters by Gravitational Disk-Shocking : Astrophysics and Relativity

Projected images of the Galactic globular clusters are not necessarily circular but elliptical in many cases. To study the possibility that the gravitational disk-shocking is the principal cause of the observed figures, we carry out a series of numerical experiments of disk-shocking on model clusters. We measure the axial ratios of the projected density contours of the model clusters, and find that the disk-shocking does not produce the values of axial ratios obtained by observations in the literature.