Related papers: Misaligned streamers around a galactic centre blac…
Star formation is enhanced in spiral arms because of a combination of orbit crowding, cloud collisions, and gravitational instabilities. The characteristic mass for the instability is 10^7 Msun in gas and 10^5 Msun in stars, and the…
The Galactic Center is the closest galactic nucleus that can be studied with unprecedented angular resolution and sensitivity. We summarize recent basic observational results on Sagittarius A* and the conditions for star formation in the…
We analyze deep near-IR adaptive optics imaging as well as new proper motion data of the nuclear star cluster of the Milky Way. The surface density distribution of faint stars peaks within 0.2" of the black hole candidate SgrA*. The radial…
We study the three-dimensional evolution of a viscous protoplanetary disc which accretes gas material from a second protoplanetary disc during a close encounter in an embedded star cluster. The aim is to investigate the capability of the…
(ABRIDGED) We present a model in which the seeds of supermassive black holes form from the lowest angular momentum gas in proto-galaxies at high redshift. We show that this leads to a correlation between black hole masses and spheroid…
Super-massive black holes (SMBH) are present at the center of most galaxies, with the related mass accretion processes giving origin to outflows in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). It has been presumed that only intense winds from luminous AGN…
We present Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of molecular cloud formation in spiral galaxies. These simulations model the response of a non-self-gravitating gaseous disk to a galactic potential. The spiral shock induces high…
We present a study of outflow, infall, and rotation in a ~10^5 Lsun (solar luminosity) star-forming region, IRAS 18360-0537, with Submillimeter Array (SMA) and IRAM 30m observations. The 1.3 mm continuum map shows a 0.5 pc dust ridge, of…
The origin of the molecular clouds orbiting SgrA* is one of the most debated questions about our Galactic Centre. Here, we present the hydrodynamic simulation of a molecular cloud infalling towards SgrA*, performed with the…
The evidence for the presence of a concentration of dark matter at the Galactic center is now very compelling. There is no question that the stellar and gas kinematics within 0.01 pc is dominated by under-luminous matter in the form of…
In 2011, we discovered a compact gas cloud ("G2") with roughly three Earth masses that is falling on a near-radial orbit toward the massive black hole in the Galactic Center. The orbit is well constrained and pericenter passage is predicted…
It has been suggested that star-forming galaxies may host a substantial, dark reservoir of gas in the form of planetary-mass molecular clouds that are so cold that $\text{H}_{2}$ can condense. Here we investigate the process of tidal…
The formation of quasar black holes during the hydrodynamic collapse of protogalactic gas clouds is discussed. The dissipational collapse and long- term dynamical evolution of these systems is analysed using three-dimensional numerical…
A massive young star cluster, initially embedded in its parent molecular cloud, will spiral into the Galactic Center from $\lta 30m_6^{1/2}\pc$ during the life-time of its most massive stars, if the combined total mass is $\sim…
Stellar prolate rotation in dwarf galaxies is rather uncommon, with only two known galaxies in the Local Group showing such feature (Phoenix and And II). Cosmological simulations show that in massive early-type galaxies prolate rotation…
In the centre of our galaxy lies a super-massive black hole, identified with the radio source Sagittarius A*. This black hole has an estimated mass of around 4 million solar masses. Although Sagittarius A* is quite dim in terms of total…
We present the results of eighteen magnetohydrodynamical calculations of the collapse of a molecular cloud core to form a protostar. Some calculations include radiative transfer in the flux-limited diffusion approximation while others…
Here we model a star forming factory in which the continuous creation of stars results in a highly concentrated, massive (globular cluster-like) stellar system. We show that under very general conditions a large-scale gravitational…
We show that seeds for quasar black holes could have originated from the initial cosmological collapse of overdense regions with unusually small rotation. The gas in these rare regions collapses into a compact disk that shrinks on a short…
Star streams in galactic halos are long, thin, unbound structures that will be disturbed by the thousands dark matter sub-halos that are predicted to be orbiting within the main halo. A sub-halo generally induces a localized wave in the…