Related papers: The Milky Way Nuclear Star Cluster
The distribution of stars around a massive black hole (MBH) has been addressed in stellar dynamics for the last four decades by a number of authors. Because of its proximity, the centre of the Milky Way is the only observational test case…
The assembly of the Milky Way bulge is an old topic in astronomy, one now in a period of renewed and rapid development. The dominant scenario for bulge formation is that of the Milky Way as a nearly pure disk galaxy, with the inner disk…
Globular star clusters contain thousands to millions of old stars packed within a region only tens of light years across. Their high stellar densities make it very probable that their member stars will interact or collide. There has been…
In this paper we report results of collisional N-body simulations of the dynamical evolution of equal-mass star clusters containing a massive central black hole. Each cluster is composed of between 5,000 to 180,000 stars together with a…
(abridged) We provide Ks photometry for roughly 39,000 stars and H-band photometry for about 11,000 stars within a field of about 40"x40", centred on Sgr A*. In addition, we provide Ks photometry of about 3,000 stars in a very deep central…
Recent observational results on high spatial resolution images of ultra-luminous infrared galaxies (ULIGs) have revealed very luminous, young, compact, and heavily obscured super star clusters in their central regions, suggested to be…
The Milky Way centre exhibits an intense flux in the gamma and X-ray bands, whose origin is partly ascribed to the possible presence of a large population of millisecond pulsars (MSPs) and cataclysmic variables (CVs), respectively. However,…
Globular clusters are compact, gravitationally bound systems of up to a million stars. The GCs in the Milky Way contain some of the oldest stars known, and provide important clues to the early formation and continuing evolution of our…
We point out that a high number density of stars in the core of a dense star cluster such as the central stellar cluster at the Galactic center, where many stars possess strong stellar winds, should result in collisions of those winds. The…
Many galaxies host pronounced circumnuclear starbursts, fuelled by infalling gas. Such activity is expected to drive the secular evolution of the nucleus and generate super winds, while the intense radiation fields and extreme gas and…
Most stars form in compact, dense embedded clusters with memberships ranging from a dozen stars to many millions of stars. Embedded clusters containing more than a few hundred stars also contain O stars that disrupt the nebula abruptly.…
Galaxy mergers are common processes in the Universe. As a large fraction of galaxies hosts at their centres a central supermassive black hole (SMBH), mergers can lead to the formation of a supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB). The…
The center of our disk galaxy, the Milky Way, is dominated by a boxy/peanut-shaped bulge. Numerous studies of the bulge based on stellar photometry have concluded that the bulge stars are exclusively old. The perceived lack of young stars…
Photometrically distinct nuclear star clusters (NSCs) are common in late-type-disk and spheroidal galaxies. The formation of NSCs is inevitable in the context of normal star formation in which a majority of stars form in clusters. A young,…
The QCD phase transition in the early universe may provide primordial black hole nuclei for globular clusters. We consider the accretion and star formation that follow, once 1000 solar mass nuclei have formed. When such a nucleus has…
The nuclear disc is a dense stellar structure at the centre of the Milky Way, with a radius of $\sim$150 pc. It has been a place of intense star formation in the past several tens of millions of years but its overall formation history has…
We present results from dynamical Monte Carlo simulations of dense star clusters near the Galactic center. These clusters sink toward the center of the Galaxy by dynamical friction. During their inspiral, they may undergo core collapse and…
Close encounters and physical collisions between stars in young dense clusters can result in new channels for stellar evolution, and may lead to the formation of very massive stars and black holes via runaway merging. We present some…
Stars are usually formed in clusters in the dense cores of molecular clouds. These embedded clusters show a wide variety of morphologies from hierarchical clusters with substructure to centrally condensed ones. Often they are elongated and…
We summarize some recent results from our observational campaign to study the central regions of spiral galaxies of late Hubble type (Scd - Sm). These disk-dominated, bulgeless galaxies have an apparently uneventful merger history. The…