Related papers: Mergers and Obliquities in Stellar Triples
In the near-Earth asteroid population, binary and triple systems have been discovered with mutual orbits that have significant eccentricities as well as large semi-major axes. All known systems with eccentric orbits and all widely-separated…
We study the orbital evolution of black hole (BH) binaries in quadruple systems, where the tertiary binary excites large eccentricity in the BH binary through Lidov-Kozai (LK) oscillations, causing the binary BHs to merge via gravitational…
This paper reviews the rich corpus of observational evidence for tidal effects in short-period binaries. We review the evidence for ellipsoidal variability and for the observational manifestation of apsidal motion in eclipsing binaries.…
Because the majority of massive stars are born as members of close binary systems, populations of massive main-sequence stars contain stellar mergers and products of binary mass transfer. We simulate populations of massive stars accounting…
The most puzzling property of the extrasolar planets discovered by recent radial velocity surveys is their high orbital eccentricities, which are very difficult to explain within our current theoretical paradigm for planet formation.…
The secular approximation for the evolution of hierarchical triple configurations has proven to be very useful in many astrophysical contexts, from planetary to triple-star systems. In this approximation the orbits may change shape and…
The challenge of constraining both the inner and the outer orbits in multiple stars has resulted in a growing abyss between the rich theoretical and the sparse observational studies of von Zeipel-Kozai-Lidov (ZKL) oscillations in stellar…
The Galactic Center (GC) is dominated by the gravity of a super-massive black hole (SMBH), Sagittarius A$^*$, and is suspected to contain a sizable population of binary stars. Such binaries form hierarchical triples with the SMBH,…
Recent simulations of Be stars in misaligned binary systems have revealed that misalignment between the disc and binary orbit can cause the disc to undergo Kozai-Lidov (KL) oscillations or disc-tearing. We build on our previous suite of…
The Kozai mechanism often destabilises high inclination orbits. It couples changes in the eccentricity and inclination, and drives high inclination, circular orbits to low inclination, eccentric orbits. In a recent study of the dynamics of…
Tidal disruption events (TDEs) take place when a star ventures too close to a supermassive black hole (SMBH) and becomes ruptured. One of the leading proposed physical mechanisms often invoked in the literature involves weak two-body…
We present an analytic model for blue straggler formation in globular clusters. We assume that blue stragglers are formed only through stellar collisions and binary star evolution, and compare our predictions to observed blue straggler…
Stellar binaries in galactic centers are relevant to several observable phenomena, including hypervelocity stars, X-ray binaries, and mergers of stars and compact objects; however, we know little about the properties of these binaries. Past…
The LIGO/Virgo detections of compact object mergers have posed a challenge for theories of binary evolution and coalescence. One promising avenue for producing mergers dynamically is through secular eccentricity oscillations driven by an…
The inspiral and merger of eccentric binaries leads to gravitational waveforms distinct from those generated by circularly merging binaries. Dynamical environments can assemble binaries with high eccentricity and peak frequencies within the…
Context. Blue Stragglers Stars (BSSs) are thought to form in globular clusters by two main formation channels: i) mergers induced by stellar collisions and ii) coalescence or mass-transfer between companions in binary systems. The detailed…
Many proposed scenarios for black hole (BH) mergers involve a tertiary companion that induces von Zeipel-Lidov-Kozai (ZLK) eccentricity cycles in the inner binary. An attractive feature of such mechanisms is the enhanced merger probability…
We consider a hierarchical triple system consisting of an inner eccentric binary with an outer companion. A highly misaligned circumbinary disk around the inner binary is subject to two competing effects: (i) nodal precession about the…
The merger history of a galaxy is thought to be one of the major factors determining its internal dynamics, with galaxies having undergone different types or mergers (e.g. dry, minor or major mergers) predicted to show different dynamical…
We examine the effects of dynamical evolution in clusters on planetary systems or protoplanetary disks orbiting the components of binary stars. In particular, we look for evidence that the companions of host stars of planetary systems or…