CONSTRAINTS ON THE INITIAL CONDITIONS OF GLOBULAR-CLUSTERS

N-body simulations are made with a variety of initial conditions, in p articular clumpy and flattened distributions, to attempt to constrain the possible initial conditions of globular clusters, using the observ ations that young LMC globular clusters appear relaxed after only 20 t o 40 Myr. It is found that violent relaxation is able to erase most of the initial substructure in only approximate to 6 crossing times, How ever, initially very clumpy distributions (less than or similar to 100 clumps) form clusters that are too concentrated to resemble real glob ular clusters, Such clusters also often have large clumps in long-last ing (greater than or similar to 30 crossing times) orbits which do not appear in observed cluster profiles. It is also found that even modes t amounts of initial flattening produce clusters that are too elliptic al to resemble real globular clusters. In such a scenario, cloud-cloud collisions and similar energetic processes would be unlikely to produ ce sufficiently spherical globular clusters. It is suggested that glob ular clusters form from roughly spherical initial conditions with star formation occurring either smoothly or in many small clumps.