Journal of Statistical Physics, Vol. 105, Nos. 3/4, November 2001. p. 585-604.
We study a system of gravitationally interacting sticky particles. At the initial time, we have n particles, each with mass 1/n and momentum 0, independently spread on [0, 1] according to the uniform law. Due to the confining of the system, all particles merge into a single cluster after a finite time. We give the asymptotic laws of the time of the last collision and of the time of the k-th collision, when n —> oo.