Related papers: Dynamical Friction around Supermassive Black Holes
The timescale for galaxies within merging dark matter halos to merge with each other is an important ingredient in galaxy formation models. Accurate estimates of merging timescales are required for predictions of astrophysical quantities…
Dynamical friction governs the orbital decay of massive perturbers within galaxies and dark matter halos, yet its standard Chandrasekhar formulation fails in systems with cores of (roughly) constant density, where inspiral can halt or even…
Although supermassive black holes (SMBHs) correlate well with their host galaxies, there is an emerging view that outliers exist. Henize 2-10, NGC 4889, and NGC1277 are examples of SMBHs at least an order of magnitude more massive than…
We review the motivation and search for supermassive black holes (BHs) in galaxies. Energetic nuclear activity provides indirect but compelling evidence for BH engines. Ground-based dynamical searches for central dark objects are reviewed…
We investigate the dynamics of stellar-mass black holes (BH) in star clusters focusing on the dynamical formation of BH-BH binaries, which are very important sources of gravitational waves (GW). We examine the properties of these BH-BH…
It is now well-established that a dark, compact object (DCO), very likely a massive black hole (MBH) of around four million solar masses is lurking at the centre of the Milky Way. While a consensus is emerging about the origin and growth of…
In the past three decades, many stars orbiting about the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the Galactic Centre (Sgr A*) were identified. Their orbital nature can give stringent constraints for the mass of the SMBH. In particular, the star…
Theoretical modeling of massive stars predicts a gap in the black hole (BH) mass function above $\sim 40-50\,M_{\odot}$ for BHs formed through single star evolution, arising from (pulsational) pair-instability supernovae. However, in dense…
A massive black hole (MBH) consumes stars whose orbits evolve into the small phase-space volume of unstable orbits, the "loss-cone", which take them directly into the MBH, or close enough to interact strongly with it. The resulting…
The hierarchical galaxy formation picture suggests that super massive black holes (MBHs) observed in galactic nuclei today have grown from coalescence of massive black hole binaries (MBHB) after galaxy merging. Once the components of a MBHB…
How fast a satellite decays its orbit depends on how slowly its mass is lost by tide. Motivated by inner halo satellite remnants like the Sgr and Omega Cen, we develop fully analytical models to study the orbital decay and tidal massloss of…
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 consider a black hole (BH) density cusp in a nuclear star cluster (NSC) hosting a supermassive back hole (SMBH) at its center. Assuming the stars and BHs inside the SMBH sphere of influence are mass-segregated, we calculate the number of…
The dynamical friction timescale for globular clusters to sink to the center of a dwarf elliptical galaxy (dE) is significantly less than a Hubble time if the halos have King-model or isothermal profiles and the globular clusters formed…
We estimate the timescales for orbital decay of wide binaries embedded within dark matter halos, due to dynamical friction against the dark matter particles. We derive analytical scalings for this decay and calibrate and test them through…
Fragmentation often occurs in disk-like structures, both in the early Universe and in the context of present-day star formation. Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are astrophysical objects whose origin is not well understood; they weigh…
We investigate the dynamics of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galactic cores by means of a semi-analytic model based on the Langevin equation, including dynamical friction and stochastic noise accounting for the gravitational…
Dynamical friction implies a consistency check on any system where dark matter particles are hypothesised to explain orbital dynamics requiring more mass under Newtonian gravity than is directly detectable. Introducing the assumption of a…
We use N-body simulations to study the evolution of the orbital eccentricities of stars deposited near (<0.05 pc) the Milky Way massive black hole (MBH), starting from initial conditions motivated by two competing models for their origin:…
We investigate the interaction of a massive globular cluster (GC) with a super massive black hole (SMBH), located at the centre of its host galaxy, by means of direct N-body simulations. The results show that tidal distortions induced by…