Related papers: Stellar Relaxation Processes Near the Galactic Mas…
Various past theoretical considerations and observational efforts suggest the presence of a population of stellar-mass black holes in the innermost parsec of the Galactic centre. In this Letter, we investigate the impact of these black…
Stars often reside in binary configurations. The nuclear star cluster surrounding the supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the Galactic Center (GC) is expected to include a binary population. In this dense environment, a binary frequently…
We study the orbital decay of a pair of massive black holes (BHs) with masses 5 * 10^5 and 10^7 M_sun, using hydrodynamical simulations of circumnuclear disks (CNDs) with the alternating presence of sub-grid physics such as radiative…
There is abundant evidence that heating processes in the central regions of elliptical galaxies has both prevented large-scale cooling flows and assisted in the expulsion of metal rich gas. We now know that each such spheroidal system…
The dynamics of massive black holes (BHs) in galaxy mergers is a rich field of research that has seen much progress in recent years. In this contribution we briefly review the processes describing the journey of BHs during mergers, from the…
This thesis embraces several aspects of theoretical stellar dynamics in clusters, both analytically and numerically. We try to elucidate the phenomena currently observed in all types of galaxies, including AGNs and quasars, some of the most…
Matter and dark matter in galaxies represent two main components linked by the gravitational interaction. Collisions of galaxies may create an offset between the centers of mass of these components. Ignoring internal dynamics of particles…
Gravitational-wave (GW) recoil of merging supermassive black holes (SMBHs) may influence the co-evolution of SMBHs and their host galaxies. We examine this possibility using SPH/N-body simulations of gaseous galaxy mergers in which the…
Supermassive black holes dominate the gravitational potential in galactic nuclei. In these dense environments, stars follow nearly Keplerian orbits and see their orbital planes relax through the potential fluctuations generated by the…
The putative ubiquity of massive black holes (MBH) at the center of galaxies, and the hierarchical progress of structure formation along the cosmic history, together necessarily imply the existence of a large population of cosmic MBH…
We review possible dynamical formation processes for central massive black holes in dense star clusters. We focus on the early dynamical evolution of young clusters containing a few thousand to a few million stars. One natural formation…
At low redshift, massive black holes are found in the centers of almost all large elliptical galaxies, and also in many lower-mass systems. Their evolution is believed to be inextricably entangled with that of their host galaxies. On the…
In this paper, we investigate the quality of constraining the spin of the massive black hole (MBH) at the Galactic center (GC) by using full general relativistic simulations of the motion of a surrounding star. We obtain the dependence…
We study the early dynamical evolution of young, dense star clusters using Monte Carlo simulations for systems with up to N~10^7 stars. Rapid mass segregation of massive main-sequence stars and the development of the Spitzer instability can…
The effect of stars on the lensing properties of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center is similar to the effect of planets on microlensing by a star. We show that the dense stellar cluster around SgrA* increases by factors of a…
Galactic bulges are known to harbour central black holes whose mass is tightly correlated with the stellar mass and velocity dispersion of the bulge. In a hierarchical universe, mergers of subgalactic units are accompanied by the…
Dynamical friction (DF) against stars and gas is thought to be an important mechanism for orbital evolution of massive black holes (MBHs) in merger remnant galaxies. Recent theoretical investigations however show that DF does not always…
We compute the expected low-frequency gravitational wave signal from coalescing massive black hole (MBH) binaries at the center of galaxies. We follow the merging history of halos and associated holes via cosmological Monte Carlo…
We discuss the structure of a central stellar cluster whose dynamics is influenced by gravitation of a supermassive black hole and by the dissipative interaction of orbiting stars with an accretion disc. We also take the effect of disc…
In this paper we revisit the "eccentric disc instability", an instability which occurs in coherently eccentric discs of stars orbiting massive black holes (MBHs) embedded in stellar clusters, which results in stars achieving either very…