Dynamical evolution of rotating stellar systems: Fokker-Planck and N-body

Abstract We have carried out comparative study between direct N -body technique and Fokker–Planck approach for the dynamical evolution of rotating stellar systems. Because of limitations of computing resources, we have restricted to relatively small N ( ∼ 10 , 000 ) systems compared to realistic star clusters. We found that these two different approaches generally give very similar results. Some minor differences are found to exist, but they can be understood because Fokker–Planck approach has to make some simplifying assumptions.