Related papers: The Milky Way Nuclear Star Cluster
Recent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have revealed that a large fraction of late-type (Sc and later) spiral galaxies harbor a bright, compact stellar cluster in their dynamical centers. Statistics of the mass, age, and…
Galactic nuclei often harbor a disproportionately large amount of star formation activity with respect to their surrounding disks. Not coincidentally, the density of molecular material in galactic nuclei is often also much greater than that…
Recent observations of young embedded clumpy clusters and statistical identifications of binary star clusters have provided new insights into the formation process and subsequent dynamical evolution of star clusters. The early dynamical…
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…
Rapid formation of supermassive black holes occurs in dense nuclear star clusters that are initially gas-dominated. Stellar-mass black hole remnants of the most massive cluster sink into the core, where a massive runaway black hole forms as…
Observations show the presence, in the halo of our Galaxy, of stars moving at velocities so high to require an acceleration mechanism involving the presence of a massive central black hole. Thus, in the frame of a galaxy hosting a…
The ACS Virgo cluster survey by Cote' and collaborators shows the presence of compact nuclei at the photocenters of many early-type galaxies. It is argued that they are the low-mass counterparts of nuclei hosting Super Massive Black Holes…
The Galactic center is a hotbed of star formation activity, containing the most massive star formation site and three of the most massive young star clusters in the Galaxy. Given such a rich environment, it contains more stars with initial…
Nuclear stellar cluster (NSCs) are known to exist around massive black holes (MBHs) in galactic nuclei. Two formation scenarios were suggested for their origin: (1) Build-up of NSCs from consecutive infall of stellar cluster and (2)…
Galactic nuclei host central massive objects either in the form of supermassive black holes or nuclear stellar clusters. Recent investigations have shown that both components co-exist in at least a few galaxies. In this paper we explore the…
As self-gravitating systems, dense star clusters exhibit a natural diffusion of energy from their innermost to outermost regions, which leads to a slow and steady contraction of the core until it ultimately collapses under gravity. However,…
This review examines the state-of-the-art knowledge of high-mass star and massive cluster formation, gained from ambitious observational surveys, which acknowledge the multi-scale characteristics of these processes. After a brief overview…
In large spheroidal stellar systems, such as elliptical galaxies, one invariably finds a 10^6-10^9 M_Sun supermassive black hole at their centre. In contrast, within dwarf elliptical galaxies one predominantly observes a 10^5-10^7 M_Sun…
Like most galaxies, the Milky Way harbors a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at its center, surrounded by a nuclear star cluster. In this dense star cluster, direct collisions can occur between stars before they evolve off the main-sequence.…
Hundreds of stellar-mass black holes likely form in a typical globular star cluster, with all but one predicted to be ejected through dynamical interactions. Some observational support for this idea is provided by the lack of X-ray-emitting…
The formation environment of stars in massive stellar clusters is similar to the environment of stars forming in galaxies at a redshift of 1 - 3, at the peak star formation rate density of the Universe. As massive clusters are still forming…
Recent surveys of star forming regions have shown that most stars, and probably all massive stars, are born in dense stellar clusters. The mechanism by which a molecular cloud fragments to form several hundred to thousands of individual…
Gravitational wave emission by coalescing black holes (BHs) kicks the remnant BH with a typical velocity of hundreds of km/s. This velocity is sufficiently large to remove the remnant BH from a low-mass galaxy but is below the escape…
During the early merger of the Milky Way, intermediate-mass black holes in merged dwarf galaxies may have been ejected from the center of their host galaxies due to gravitational waves, carrying some central stars along. This process can…
The high stellar densities in young compact star clusters, such as the star cluster R 136 in the 30 Doradus region, may lead to a large number of stellar collisions. Such collisions were recently found to be much more frequent than previous…