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We use the Chandrasekhar formalism and direct N-body simulations to study theeffect of dynamical friction on a test object only slightly more massive thanthe field stars, orbiting a spherically symmetric background of particles witha mass spectrum. The main goal is to verify whether the dynamical friction time(t_DF) develops a non-monotonic radial-dependence that could explain thebimodality of the Blue Straggler radial distributions observed in globularclusters. In these systems, in fact, relaxation effects lead to a mass andvelocity radial segregation of the different mass components, so thatmass-spectrum effects on t_DF are expected to be dependent on radius. We findthat, in spite of the presence of different masses, t_DF is always a monotonicfunction of radius, at all evolutionary times and independently of the initialconcentration of the simulated cluster. This because the radial dependence oft_DF is largely dominated by the total mass density profile of the backgroundstars (which is monotonically decreasing with radius). Hence, a progressivetemporal erosion of the BSS population at larger and larger distances from thecluster center remains the simplest and the most likely explanation of theshape of the observed BSS radial distributions, as suggested in previous works.We also confirm the theoretical expectation that approximating a multi-massglobular cluster as made of (averaged) equal-mass stars can lead to significantoverestimates of t_DF within the half-mass radius.

Dynamical friction in multi-component evolving globular clusters