Related papers: Loss Cone Dynamics
Supermassive black holes dominate the gravitational potential in galactic nuclei. In these dense environments, stars follow nearly Keplerian orbits and see their orbital planes relax through the potential fluctuations generated by the…
Simulations of the collapse and fragmentation of turbulent molecular clouds and dense young clusters show that encounters between disc-surrounded stars are relatively common events which should significantly influence the resulting disc…
Dense stellar clusters surround the supermassive black holes (SMBH) in galactic nuclei. Interactions within the cluster can alter the stellar orbits, occasionally driving a star into the SMBH's tidal radius where it becomes ruptured, or…
The supermassive black holes found at the centers of galaxies are often surrounded by dense star clusters. The ages of these clusters are generally longer than the resonant-relaxation time and shorter than the two-body relaxation time over…
Non-spherical potentials allow a wide range of trajectories, both regular and chaotic, whose periapse distances can vary orbit to orbit. In particular chaotic trajectories can bring a system arbitrarily close to the central massive black…
Orientation of parsec-scale accretion disks in AGN is likely to be nearly random for different black hole feeding episodes. Since AGN accretion disks are unstable to self-gravity on parsec scales, star formation in these disks will create…
Supermassive Black Holes grow at the center of galaxies in consonance with them. In this review we discuss the mass feeding mechanisms that lead to this growth in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), focusing on constraints derived from…
Mini-black holes made of dark matter that can potentially form in the interior of neutron stars have been always thought to grow by accreting the matter of the core of the star via a spherical Bondi accretion. However, neutron stars have…
Virtually all massive galaxies, including our own, host central black holes ranging in mass from millions to billions of solar masses. The growth of these black holes releases vast amounts of energy that powers quasars and other weaker…
A massive black hole binary might resonantly trap a star (e.g. a white dwarf) and the gas released by its tidal disruption might emit electromagnetic wave signals around the coalescence of the binary. With post-Newtonian equations of motion…
We generalize the effective point particle approach to black hole dynamics to include spin. In this approach dissipative effects are captured by degrees of freedom localized on the wordline. The absorptive properties of the black hole are…
Nuclear star clusters (NSCs) and supermassive black holes (SMBHs) both inhabit galactic nuclei, coexisting in a range of bulge masses, but excluding each other in the largest or smallest galaxies. We propose that the transformation of NSCs…
When a dark matter halo falls into a more massive object and becomes a subhalo, it typically loses much of its mass through tidal stripping. The reverse process is also possible in principle. The subhalo may gravitationally capture material…
We propose that the growth of supermassive black holes is associated mainly with brief episodes of highly super-Eddington infall of gas ("hyperaccretion"). This gas is not swallowed in real time, but forms an envelope of matter around the…
Sufficiently massive growing giant planets have circumplanetary disks, and the capture of solid bodies by the disks would likely influence the growth of the planets and formation of satellite systems around them. In addition to dust…
We use cosmological hydrodynamical simulations to show that a significant fraction of the gas in high redshift rare massive halos falls nearly radially to their very centre on extremely short timescales. This process results in the…
We investigate the dynamical interaction of a central star cluster surrounding a super-massive black hole and a central accretion disk. The dissipative force acting on stars in the disk leads to an enhanced mass flow towards the…
Aims. In this paper we continue our study of density cusps that may contain central black holes. Methods. We recall our attempts to use distribution functions with a memory of self-similar relaxation, but mostly they apply only in…
We review the current state of dynamical modeling for galaxies in terms of being able to measure both the central black hole mass and stellar orbital structure. Both of these must be known adequately to measure either property. The current…
We consider the evolution of a cosmic string loop that is captured by a much more massive and compact black hole. We show that after several reconnections that produce ejections of smaller loops, the loop that remains bound to the black…