Related papers: Infalling clouds on to supermassive black hole bin…
The study of the dynamical evolution of massive black hole pairs in mergers is crucial in the context of a hierarchical galaxy formation scenario. The timescales for the formation and the coalescence of black hole binaries are still poorly…
By using direct N-body numerical simulations, we model the dynamical co-evolution of two supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and the surrounding stars in merging galaxies. In order to investigate how different stellar components evolve during…
This paper studies the formation and evolution of binary supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in rotating galactic nuclei, focusing on the role of stellar dynamics. We present the first N-body simulations that follow the evolution of the SMBHs…
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are a ubiquitous component of the nuclei of galaxies. It is normally assumed that, following the merger of two massive galaxies, a SMBH binary will form, shrink due to stellar or gas dynamical processes and…
Supermassive black hole binaries may form as a consequence of galaxy mergers. Both prograde and retrograde orbits have been proposed. We study a binary of a small mass ratio, q, in a retrograde orbit immersed in and interacting with a…
The putative ubiquity of massive black holes (MBH) at the center of galaxies, and the hierarchical progress of structure formation along the cosmic history, together necessarily imply the existence of a large population of cosmic MBH…
We study the orbital evolution and accretion history of massive black hole (MBH) pairs in rotationally supported circumnuclear discs up to the point where MBHs form binary systems. Our simulations have high resolution in mass and space…
Supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries represent the main target for missions such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna and Pulsar Timing Arrays. The understanding of their dynamical evolution prior to coalescence is therefore crucial…
Stellar-mass binary black holes (BBHs) embedded in active galactic nucleus (AGN) discs are possible progenitors of black-hole mergers detected in gravitational waves by LIGO/VIRGO. To better understand the hydrodynamical evolution of BBHs…
We estimate the amplitude of the nano-Hz stochastic gravitational wave background (GWB) resulting from an unresolved population of inspiralling massive black hole binaries (MBHBs). To this aim, we use the L-Galaxies semi-analytical model…
We study the evolution of a massive black hole pair in a rotationally supported nuclear disc. The distributions of stars and gas mimic the nuclear region of a gas-rich galaxy merger remnant. Using high-resolution SPH simulations, we follow…
Using highly-accurate $N$-body simulations, we explore the evolution of multiple massive black holes (hereafter, MBHs) in a primordial galaxy that is composed of stars and MBHs. The evolution is pursed with a fourth-order Hermite scheme,…
We present an overview of recent numerical advances in the theoretical characterization of massive binary black hole (MBBH) mergers in astrophysical environments. These systems are among the loudest sources of gravitational waves (GWs) in…
We perform a suite of high-resolution smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations to investigate the orbital decay and mass evolution of massive black hole (MBH) pairs down to scales of ~30 pc during minor mergers of disk galaxies. Our…
The evolution of Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) initially embedded in the centres of merging galaxies realised with a stellar mass function (SMF) is studied from the onset of galaxy mergers till coalescence. We performed a large set of…
The evolution of the supermassive Black Hole (BH) population across cosmic times remains a central unresolved issue in modern astrophysics, due to the many noticeable uncertainties in the involved physical processes that span a huge range…
Primordial black hole (PBH) binaries experience strong gravitational perturbations in the case of their initial clustering, which significantly affects the dynamics of their mergers. In this work, we develop a new formalism to account for…
We present the results of high-resolution numerical simulations of gas clouds falling onto binary supermassive black holes to form circumbinary accretion discs, with both prograde and retrograde cloud orbits. We explore a range of clouds…
Massive black hole binaries (MBHBs) could be the loudest gravitational-wave (GW) sources in milli-Hertz (mHz) GW band, but their dynamical evolution may stall when the black holes reach the innermost parsec of a galaxy. Such a "final-parsec…
The hierarchical galaxy formation picture suggests that super massive black holes (MBHs) observed in galactic nuclei today have grown from coalescence of massive black hole binaries (MBHB) after galaxy merging. Once the components of a MBHB…