Related papers: Ergoregion instability of ultra-compact astrophysi…
Ultralight bosons can be abundantly produced through superradiance process by a spinning black hole and form a bound state with hydrogen-like spectrum. We show that such a "gravitational atom" typically possesses anomalously large mass…
We identify a new secular instability of eccentric stellar disks around supermassive black holes. We show that retrograde precession of the stellar orbits, due to the presence of a stellar cusp, induces coherent torques that amplify…
Supermassive black holes with masses of millions to billions of solar masses are commonly found in the centers of galaxies. Astronomers seek to image jet formation using radio interferometry, but still suffer from insufficient angular…
Superradiant clouds may develop around a rotating black hole, if there is a bosonic field with Compton wavelength comparable to the size of the black hole. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the cloud on the orbits of nearby…
Gravitational signatures of black hole superradiance are a unique probe of ultralight particles that are weakly-coupled to ordinary matter. The existence of an ultralight boson would lead spinning black holes with size comparable to the…
Protostellar (class 0/I) disks, having masses comparable to those of their nascent host stars, and fed continuously from their natal infalling envelopes, are prone to gravitational instability (GI). Motivated by advances in near-infrared…
Black hole (BH)--torus systems are promising candidates for the central engine of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), and also possible outcomes of the collapse of supermassive stars to supermassive black holes (SMBHs). By three-dimensional general…
Results are presented from high-precision computations of the orbital evolution and emitted gravitational waves for a stellar-mass object spiraling into a massive black hole in a slowly shrinking, circular, equatorial orbit. The focus of…
We explore the prospects for Advanced LIGO to detect gravitational waves from neutron stars and stellar mass black holes spiraling into intermediate-mass ($M\sim 50 M_\odot$ to $350 M_\odot$) black holes. We estimate an event rate for such…
We investigate induced oscillations by the gravitational field of a fast stellar object, such as a neutron star or a black-hole in a near miss collision with another star. Non-adiabatic collision conditions may lead to large amplitude…
Exotic compact objects (ECOs) are a theorized class of compact objects that solve the paradoxes of black holes by replacing the event horizon with a physical surface located at $r=r_+(1+\epsilon)$ from the would-be horizon at $r_+$.…
We give a unified description of the flip-flop effect in spinning binary black holes and the anti-alignment instability in terms of real and imaginary flip-flop frequencies. We find that this instability is only effective for mass ratios…
We compute gravitational waves emitted by the collapse of a rotating very massive star (VMS) core leading directly to a black hole in axisymmetric numerical-relativity simulations. The evolved rotating VMS is derived by a stellar evolution…
A thermodynamic argument is presented suggesting that near-extremal spinning D1-D5-P black strings become unstable when their angular momentum exceeds $J_{crit} = {3Q_1Q_5}/2\sqrt{2}$. In contrast, the dimensionally reduced black holes are…
We derive a viscosity from gravitational instability in self-gravitating accretion disks, which has the required properties to account for the observed fast formation of the first super-massive black holes in highly redshifted quasars and…
The global nonlinear time-dependent evolution of the inertial-acoustic mode instability in accretion disks surrounding black holes has been investigated. The viscous stress is assumed to be proportional to the gas pressure only, i.e.\,,…
Detecting a compact subsolar object would have profound implications in physics, the reach of which depends on the nature of the object. Here we explore such consequences for a putative subsolar-mass gravitational wave event detected by the…
It is now established that small Kerr-Anti-de Sitter (Kerr-AdS) black holes are unstable against scalar perturbations, via superradiant amplification mechanism. We show that small Kerr-AdS black holes are also unstable against gravitational…
With high spatial resolution, polarimetric imaging of a supermassive black hole, like M87$^\star$ or Sgr A$^\star$, by the Event Horizon Telescope can be used to probe the existence of ultralight bosonic particles, such as axions. Such…
Growing theoretical evidence suggests that the first generation of stars may have been quite massive (~100-300 solar masses). If they retain their high mass until death, such stars will, after about 3Myr, make pair-instability supernovae.…