Related papers: Gravitational Encounters and the Evolution of Gala…
We develop a simple physical model to describe the dynamics of a massive point-like object, such as a black hole, near the center of a dense stellar system. It is shown that the total force on this body can be separated into two independent…
Supermassive black holes have been discovered at the centers of galaxies, and also in globular clusters. The data shows correlations between the black hole mass and the elliptical galaxy mass or globular cluster mass. It is shown that this…
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…
A supermassive black hole has been found at the centre of nearly every galaxy observed with sufficient sensitivity. The masses of these black holes are observed to increase with either the total mass or the mean (random) velocity of the…
A star with main sequence mass greater than $25\sim 30\msun$ may collapse to a black hole of about 10 $\msun$ at the final stage of the evolution. About an order of 1\% of stellar mass is likely to be in form of such black holes in…
The motion of stars in the gravitational potential of a triaxial galaxy is generically chaotic. However, the timescale over which the chaos manifests itself in the orbital motion is a strong function of the degree of central concentration…
Dense star clusters are spectacular self-gravitating stellar systems in our Galaxy and across the Universe - in many respects. They populate disks and spheroids of galaxies as well as almost every galactic center. In massive elliptical…
Various past theoretical considerations and observational efforts suggest the presence of a population of stellar-mass black holes in the innermost parsec of the Galactic centre. In this Letter, we investigate the impact of these black…
In a recent work we have argued that nosy energy momentum diffusion due to space-time discreteness at the Planck scale (naturally expected to arise from quantum gravity) can be responsible for the generation of a cosmological constant…
The evolution of the dark matter distribution at the Galactic center is analyzed, which is caused by the combination of gravitational scattering on Galactic bulge stars and absorption by a supermassive black hole at the center of the bulge.…
In the past decade, much effort was devoted to measure the masses of supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei, to establish the relation between black hole mass and the global/nuclear properties of the host galaxy, and to understand the…
We examine the effect of an accretion disc on the orbits of stars in the central star cluster surrounding a central massive black hole by performing a suite of 39 high-accuracy direct N-body simulations using state-of-the art software and…
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…
We present recent developments on numerical algorithms for computing photon and particle trajectories in the surrounding of compact objects. Strong gravity around neutron stars or black holes causes relativistic effects on the motion of…
We analyze three sets of infrared star counts in the inner ~0.5 pc of the Galactic Center. We perform statistical tests on the star counts and model in detail the extinction field and the effects of dwarf-giant collisions on the luminosity…
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 influence of rotation on the dynamical evolution of collisional stellar systems is investigated by solving the orbit-averaged Fokker-Planck equation in (E,J_z)-space. We find that large amounts of initial rotation drive the system into…
The evolution of dense star clusters is followed by direct high-accuracy N-body simulation. The problem is to first order a gravitational N-body problem, but stars evolve due to astrophysics and the more massive ones form black holes or…
We calculate the first dynamical evolutions of merging black hole-neutron star binaries that construct the combined black hole-neutron star spacetime in a general relativistic framework. We treat the metric in the conformal flatness…
Interaction of a binary supermassive black hole with stars in a galactic nucleus can result in changes to all the elements of the binary's orbit, including the angles that define its orientation. If the nucleus is rotating, the orientation…