Related papers: Hypervelocity Planets and Transits Around Hypervel…
The speed gain of a test mass from taking a gravitational slingshot around a celestial object (scattering centre) increases with the latter's speed and compactness (stronger deflection of the mass' trajectory becomes possible without it…
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…
Hypervelocity stars (HVS) move so fast that they are unbound to the Galaxy. When they were first discovered in 2005, dynamical ejection from the supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the Galactic Centre (GC) was suggested as their origin. The…
Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) escaping away from the Galactic halo are dynamical products of interactions of stars with the massive black hole(s) (MBH) in the Galactic Center (GC). They are mainly B-type stars with their progenitors unknown.…
We performed numerical simulations of dynamical encounters between hard massive binaries and a very massive star (VMS; formed through runaway mergers of ordinary stars in the dense core of a young massive star cluster), in order to explore…
Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) represent a unique class of objects capable of escaping the gravitational pull of the Milky Way due to extreme acceleration events, such as close encounters with the supermassive black hole at the Galactic center…
If supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) are driven together by gas disks in galactic nuclei, then a surrounding nuclear star cluster or in-situ star-formation should deliver stars to the disk plane. Migration through the circumbinary…
Secular perturbations from binary stars and distant massive planets can drive cold planets onto nearly parabolic orbits with pericenter passages extremely close to their host stars. Meanwhile, short-period super-Earths are frequently…
Recently, an ionized cloud of gas was discovered plunging toward the supermassive black hole, SgrA*, at the centre of the Milky Way. The cloud is being tidally disrupted along its path to closest approach at ~3100 Schwarzschild radii from…
The centers of galaxies host a supermassive black hole surrounded by a dense stellar cluster. The cluster is expected to develop mass segregation, in which gravitational scatterings among the stars cause heavier objects to sink closer to…
Stellar clusters are potential acceleration sites of very-high-energy (VHE, E > 100GeV) particles since they host supernova remnants (SNRs) and pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe). Additionally, in stellar clusters, particles can also be accelerated…
Binary stars that are on close orbits around massive black holes (MBH) such as Sgr A* in the center of the Milky Way are liable to undergo tidal disruption and eject a hypervelocity star. We study the interaction between such a MBH and…
A common origin for a host of stellar phenomena in galactic centres is the tidal encounter between stellar binaries and a massive black hole (MBH), known as the ``Hills mechanism''. Following the encounter, binaries may disrupt into an…
We present the serendipitous discovery of the fastest Main Sequence hyper-velocity star (HVS) by the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey (S5). The star S5-HVS1 is a $\sim 2.35$ M$_\odot$ A-type star located at a distance of $\sim…
Many planets are observed in stellar binary systems, and their frequency may be comparable to that of planetary systems around single stars. Binary stellar evolution in such systems influences the dynamical evolution of the resident…
We explore the hypothesis that some high-velocity runaway stars attain their peculiar velocities in the course of exchange encounters between hard massive binaries and a very massive star (either an ordinary 50-100 Msun star or a more…
Supermassive black holes in the centre of galaxies dominate the gravitational potential of their surrounding stellar clusters. In these dense environments, stars follow nearly Keplerian orbits, which get slowly distorted as a result of the…
The disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole generates a sudden bright flare. Previous studies have focused on the disruption by single black holes, for which the fallback rate decays as~$\propto t^{-5/3}$. In this paper, we…
Stars orbiting within 1$\arcsec$ of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Centre, Sgr A*, are notoriously difficult to detect due to obscuration by gas and dust. We show that some stars orbiting this region may be detectable via…
Tantalizing evidence has been presented supporting the suggestion that a large population of extragalactic gas clouds permeates the Local Group, a population which has been associated with the Galactic High-Velocity Clouds (HVCs). We…