Related papers: The final-parsec problem in the collisionless limi…
We use controlled N-body simulations to study the collisional exchange of energy between stars and dark matter in ultra-faint galaxies. We find that dynamical friction between stars and subsolar-mass dark matter particles results in the…
Most galaxies have central massive black holes (BH), and merge with others during their evolution, as strongly suggested by recent observations. Consequently a black hole binary (BHB) emerges. Considering the evolution of the binary when it…
Boson stars, self-gravitating objects made of a complex scalar field, have been proposed as simple models for very different scenarios, ranging from galaxy dark matter to black hole mimickers. Here we focus on a very compact type of boson…
Supermassive black holes can capture or disrupt stars that come sufficiently close. This article reviews the dynamical processes by which stars or stellar remnants are placed onto loss-cone orbits and the implications for feeding rates. The…
Violent relaxation during the collapse of a galaxy halo is known to be incomplete in realistic cases such as cosmological infall or mergers. We adopt a physical picture of strong but short lived interactions between potential fluctuations…
N-body simulations that follow only a collisionless dark matter component have failed to produce galaxy halos or substructure within dense environments. We investigate the `over-merging' problem analytically and with numerical simulations,…
The massive black hole (MBH) in the Galactic Center and the stars around it form a unique stellar dynamics laboratory for studying how relaxation processes affect the distribution of stars and compact remnants and lead to close interactions…
Theory and simulations are used to study collisionless relaxation of a gravitational $N$-body system. It is shown that when the initial one particle distribution function satisfies the virial condition -- potential energy is minus twice the…
The nature of binary black hole coalescence is the final, uncharted frontier of the relativistic Kepler problem. In the United States, binary black hole coalescence has been identified as a computational ``Grand Challenge'' whose solution…
I overview the current understanding of the evolution of massive black hole (MBH) binaries in the center of the host stellar system. One of the main questions is whether the stellar dynamical effect can make the MBH binary hard enough that…
In the standard cosmological paradigm, structure formation occurs via gravitational encounters and mergers between galaxies and dark matter halos. These collisionless self-gravitating systems therefore prevail in a state of non-equilibrium…
In this paper, we present our conclusions from the numerical study of the collapse of a destabilized collisionless stellar system. We use both direct integration of the Vlasov-Poisson equations and an N-body tree code to obtain our results,…
The discrete collisional breakage equation, which captures the dynamics of cluster growth when clusters encounter binary collisions with possible matter transfer, is discussed in this article. The existence of global mass-conserving…
In this study, we investigate the dynamical evolution of a massive binary black hole (MBHB) in the Leo I dwarf spheroidal galaxy model and examine how dark matter along with stellar matter's gravitational interactions influence its…
The close limit approximation of binary black hole is a powerful method to study gravitational-wave emission from highly non-linear geometries. In this work, we use it as a tool to model black hole spacetimes in theories of gravity with a…
We present the first numerical results on the binary coalescence of a quark star with a black hole, obtained with a 3-D Newtonian smooth particle hydro (SPH) code. The star is initially represented by 17,000 particles modeling a…
Direct numerical integrations of the Fokker-Planck equation in energy-angular momentum space are carried out for stars orbiting a supermassive black hole (SBH) at the center of a galaxy. The algorithm, which was described in detail in an…
Determining the final spin of a black-hole (BH) binary is a question of key importance in astrophysics. Modelling this quantity in general is made difficult by the fact that it depends on the 7-dimensional space of parameters characterizing…
In the high density cores of globular clusters, multibody interactions are expected to be common, with the result that black holes in binaries are hardened by interactions. It was shown by Sigurdsson & Hernquist (1993) and others that 10…
The "gravitational million-body problem," to model the dynamical evolution of a self-gravitating, collisional N-body system with ~10^6 particles over many relaxation times, remains a major challenge in computational astrophysics.…