Related papers: Giant Primeval Magnetic Dipoles
We present results from general relativistic calculations of the tidal disruption of white dwarf stars from near encounters with intermediate mass black holes. We follow the evolution of 0.2 and $0.6 M_\odot$ stars on parabolic trajectories…
If dark matter (DM) is millicharged or darkly charged, collective plasma processes may dominate momentum exchange over direct particle collisions. Plasma streaming instabilities can couple the momentum of the DM to counter-streaming baryons…
In our galaxy, the white dwarfs (WDs) will inevitably capture the dark matter (DM) particles streaming through them, if there exist interactions between DM particles and nuclei/electrons. At the same time, these DM particles can also be…
A star wandering too close to a supermassive black hole (SMBH) will be tidally disrupted. Previous studies of such "tidal disruption event" (TDE) mostly focus on the stellar debris that are bound to the system, because they give rise to…
The theory of superfluid dark matter is characterized by self-interacting sub-eV particles that thermalize and condense to form a superfluid core in galaxies. Massive black holes at the center of galaxies, however, modify the dark matter…
Dark matter appears in two forms as a consequence of the fluid mechanics of self-gravitational condensation. Condensation occurs primarily on non-acoustic nuclei rather than on the acoustic nuclei of the Jeans (1902) criterion, leading to a…
All four giant planets in the Solar System feature zonal flows on the order of 100 m/s in the cloud deck, and large-scale intrinsic magnetic fields on the order of 1 Gauss near the surface. The vertical structure of the zonal flows remains…
If a subdominant component of dark matter (DM) interacts via long-range dark force carriers it may cool and collapse to form complex structures within the Milky Way galaxy, such as a rotating dark disk. This scenario was proposed recently…
Self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) is an able alternative to collisionless dark matter. If dark matter does have self-interactions, we would expect this to cause a separation between the collisionless stars and the dark matter halo of a…
We adopt the conduction fluid approximation to model the steady-state distribution of matter around a massive black hole at the center of a weakly collisional cluster of particles. By "`weakly collisional" we mean a cluster in which the…
Using our previously derived simple analytic expression for the bolometric light curves of supernovae, we demonstrate that the collision of the fast debris of ordinary supernova explosions with relatively slow-moving shells from…
The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) has surprisingly strong submm and mm-wavelength emission that is inconsistent with standard dust models, including those with emission from spinning dust. Here we show that the emission from the SMC may be…
The nature of Milky Way dwarf spheroidals (MW dSphs) has been questioned, in particular whether they are dominated by dark matter (DM). Here we investigate an alternative scenario, for which tidal shocks are exerted by the MW to DM-free…
Hyper-accreting discs occur in compact-object mergers and collapsars, and may power gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). We calculate the microscopic viscosity and resistivity of plasma in these discs, and discuss the implications for their global…
We perform MHD simulations in full GR of uniformly rotating stars that are marginally unstable to collapse. Our simulations model the direct collapse of supermassive stars (SMSs) to seed black holes (BHs) that can grow to become the…
The importance of the interstellar magnetic field is studied in relation to the evolutions of superbubbles with a three-dimensional (3D) numerical magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) simulation. A superbubble is a large supernova remnant driven by…
The spectrum of oscillation modes of a star provides information not only about its material properties (e.g. mean density), but also its symmetries. Spherical symmetry can be broken by rotation and/or magnetic fields. It has been…
The discovery of a large number of supermassive black holes (SMBH) at redshifts $z > 6$, when the Universe was only 900 million years old, raises the question of how such massive compact objects could form in a cosmologically short time…
Supermassive stars (SMS) are massive hydrogen objects, slowly radiating their gravitational binding energy. Such hypothetical primordial objects may have been the seed of the massive black holes (BHs) observed at the centre of galaxies.…
We propose a novel use of high-redshift galaxies, discovered in deep Hubble Space Telescope (HST) fields around strong lensing clusters. These fields probe small comoving volumes (about 1000 cubic Mpc) at high magnification ({\mu} > 10),…