Related papers: Massive black hole binary evolution in gas-rich me…
We model for the first time the complete orbital evolution of a pair of Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) in a 1:10 galaxy merger of two disk dominated gas-rich galaxies, from the stage prior to the formation of the binary up to the onset of…
We study the orbital evolution of black hole (BH) binaries in quadruple systems, where the tertiary binary excites large eccentricity in the BH binary through Lidov-Kozai (LK) oscillations, causing the binary BHs to merge via gravitational…
We study supermassive black holes (BHs) in merging galaxies, using a suite of hydrodynamical simulations with very high spatial (~10 pc) and temporal (~1 Myr) resolution, where we vary the initial mass ratio, the orbital configuration, and…
We model the dynamical evolution of primordial black holes (BHs) in dense star clusters using a simplified treatment of stellar dynamics in which the BHs are assumed to remain concentrated in an inner core, completely decoupled from the…
We simulate mergers between galaxies containing collisionally-relaxed nuclei around massive black holes (MBHs). Our galaxies contain four mass groups, representative of old stellar populations; a primary goal is to understand the…
In this paper we study the evolution of a primordial black hole binary (BHB) in a sample of over 1500 direct-summation $N-$body simulations of small-and intermediate-size isolated star clusters as proxies of galactic open clusters. The BHBs…
Mergers of black-hole binaries are expected to release large amounts of energy in the form of gravitational radiation. However, binary evolution models predict merger rates too low to be of observational interest. In this paper we explore…
Massive black hole (MBH) binaries, formed as a result of galaxy mergers, are expected to harden by dynamical friction and three-body stellar scatterings, until emission of gravitational waves (GWs) leads to their final coalescence.…
Coalescence of binary supermassive black holes (SBHs) would constitute the strongest sources of gravitational waves to be observed by LISA. While the formation of binary SBHs during galaxy mergers is almost inevitable, coalescence requires…
In a star cluster with a sufficiently large escape velocity, black holes (BHs) that are produced by BH mergers can be retained, dynamically form new BH binaries, and merge again. This process can repeat several times and lead to significant…
We study the evolution of disk accretion during the merger of supermassive black hole binaries in galactic nuclei. In hierarchical galaxy formation models, the most common binaries are likely to arise from minor galactic mergers, and have…
Observations suggest that star clusters often form in binaries or larger bound groups. Therefore, mergers between two clusters are likely to occur. If these clusters both harbor an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH; 10^{2-4} Msun) in their…
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will detect gravitational-wave (GW) signals from merging supermassive black holes (BHs) with masses below $10^7$~M$_{\odot}$. It is thus of paramount importance to understand the orbital…
We present direct N-body simulations, carried out with Nbody6++GPU, of young and compact low metallicity star clusters with $1.1\times 10^5$ stars, a velocity dispersion of $\sim$ 10 $\mathrm{km\,s^{-1}}$, a half mass radius $R_h=0.6$ pc,…
We discuss the properties of stellar mass black hole (BH) mergers induced by tidal encounters with a massive BH at galactic centres or potentially in dense star clusters. The tidal disruption of stellar binaries by a massive BH is known to…
The high rate of black hole (BH) mergers detected by LIGO/Virgo opened questions on their astrophysical origin. One possibility is the dynamical channel, in which binary formation and hardening is catalyzed by dynamical encounters in…
We investigate the evolution of intermediate-mass (IMBHs), stellar (BHs) and binary black holes (BHBs), deposited near a supermassive black hole (SMBH) by a population of massive star clusters. Stellar BHs rapidly segregate around the SMBH,…
We perform a suite of high-resolution smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations to investigate the orbital decay and mass evolution of massive black hole (MBH) pairs down to scales of ~30 pc during minor mergers of disk galaxies. Our…
Motivated by observational searches for massive black hole (MBH) pairs at kiloparsec separations we develop a semi-analytic model to describe their orbital evolution under the influence of stellar and gaseous dynamical friction (DF). The…
In currently favoured hierarchical cosmologies, the formation of massive black hole binaries (MBHBs) following galaxy mergers is unavoidable. Still, due the complex physics governing the (hydro)dynamics of the post-merger dense environment…