Related papers: Collisionless loss-cone refilling: there is no fin…
We study the dynamical evolution of supermassive black holes, in the late stage of galaxy mergers, from kpc to pc scales. In particular, we capture the formation of the binary, a necessary step before the final coalescence, and trace back…
A circumbinary disc around a pair of merging stellar-mass black holes may be shocked and heated during the recoil of the merged hole, causing a near-simultaneous electromagnetic counterpart to the gravitational wave event. The shocks occur…
Reconstructing the properties of the astrophysical population of binary compact objects in the universe is a key science goal of gravitational wave detectors. This goal is hindered by the finite strain, frequency sensitivity and observing…
We investigate the joint mass-redshift evolution of the binary black-hole merger rate in the latest Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog, GWTC-4.0. We present and apply a novel non-parametric framework for modeling multi-dimensional,…
There is significant observational evidence that a large fraction of galactic centers, including those in the Milky Way and M31, host a supermassive black hole (SMBH) embedded in a triaxial nuclear star cluster. In this work, we study the…
The multitude of binary black hole coalescence detections in gravitational waves has renewed our interest on environments that can be the cradle of these mergers. In this work we study merger rates of binary black holes in globular clusters…
Galaxies are believed to evolve through merging, which should lead to multiple supermassive black holes in some. There are four known triple black hole systems, with the closest pair being 2.4 kiloparsecs apart (the third component is more…
Recent observational and theoretical studies have suggested that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) grow mostly through non-merger (`secular') processes. Since galaxy mergers lead to dynamical bulge growth, the only way to observationally…
The final merger of a pair of massive black holes in a galactic nucleus is compelled by gravitational radiation. Gravitational waves from the mergers of black holes of masses (10^5-10^7)(1+z)^{-1} Msun at redshifts of 1-20 will be readily…
We assess the contribution of dynamical hardening by direct three-body scattering interactions to the rate of stellar-mass black hole binary (BHB) mergers in galactic nuclei. We derive an analytic model for the single-binary encounter rate…
We use our cluster population model, cBHBd, to explore the mass distribution of merging black hole binaries formed dynamically in globular clusters. We include in our models the effect of mass growth through hierarchical mergers and compare…
In this work, we study the stellar-dynamical hardening of unequal mass supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries in the central regions of merging galactic nuclei. We present a comprehensive set of direct $N$-body simulations of the problem,…
We compute the isotropic gravitational wave (GW) background produced by binary supermassive black holes (SBHs) in galactic nuclei. In our model, massive binaries evolve at early times via gravitational-slingshot interaction with nearby…
We study the expected distribution of massive black hole (MBH) spins and its evolution with cosmic time in the context of hierarchical galaxy formation theories. Our model uses Monte Carlo realizations of the merger hierarchy in a LCDM…
From the results of numerical scattering experiments and simulations of a massive black hole binary in spherically symmetric and shallow cores it has been deduced that most likely the shrinking process stalls due to loss-cone depletion…
Stellar models indicate that the core compactness of a star, which is a common proxy for its explodability in a supernova, does not increase monotonically with the star's mass. Rather, the core compactness dips sharply over a range of…
Galaxies with stellar bulges are generically observed to host supermassive black holes (SMBHs). The hierarchical merging of galaxies should therefore lead to the formation of SMBH binaries. Merging of old massive galaxies with little gas…
Rapid binary population synthesis codes are often used to investigate the evolution of compact-object binaries. They typically rely on analytical fits of single-star evolutionary tracks and parameterized models for interactive phases of…
It is still unknown how the BBH evolves after its semi-major axis reached to the sub-parsec/parsec scale where the dynamical friction with the neighboring stars is no longer effective (the so-called the final parsec problem). In this paper,…
Using SPH numerical simulations, we investigate the effects of gas on the inspiral and merger of a massive black hole binary. This study is motivated by the very massive nuclear gas disks observed in the central regions of merging galaxies.…