Abstract

Star clusters form via clustering star formation inside molecular clouds. In order to understand the dynamical evolution of star clusters in their early phase, in which they are still embedded in their surrounding gas, we need accurate integration of individual stellar orbits without gravitational softening in the systems including both gas and stars, as well as modeling of individual stars with a realistic mass function. We develop a new tree-direct hybrid smoothed particle hydrodynamics/N-body code, ASURA$+$BRIDGE, in which stars are integrated using a direct N-body scheme or PeTar, a particle–particle particle-tree scheme code, without gravitational softening. In ASURA$+$BRIDGE, stars are assumed to have masses randomly drawn from a given initial mass function. With this code, we perform star cluster formation simulations starting from molecular clouds without gravitational softening. We find that artificial dense cores in star cluster centers due to the softening disappear when we do not use softening. We further demonstrate that star clusters are built up via mergers of smaller clumps. The star clusters formed in our simulations include some dynamically formed binaries with minimum semi-major axes of a few au, and the binary fraction is higher for more massive stars.