Related papers: Interactions between multiple supermassive black h…
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) reside at the center of every massive galaxy in the local Universe with masses that closely correlate with observations of their host galaxy implying a connected evolutionary history. The population of…
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…
Galactic nuclei harbouring a central supermassive black hole (SMBH), possibly surrounded by a dense nuclear cluster (NC), represent extreme environments which house a complex interplay of many physical processes that uniquely affect stellar…
We study the mass assembly and spin evolution of supermassive black holes (BHs) across cosmic time as well as the impact of gravitational recoil on the population of nuclear and wandering black holes (wBHs) by using the semi-analytical…
The dynamics of galactic nuclei reflects the presence of supermassive black holes (SBHs) in many ways. Single SBHs act as sinks, destroying a mass in stars equal to their own mass in roughly one relaxation time and forcing nuclei to expand.…
The capture and disruption of stars by supermassive black holes (SMBHs), and the formation and coalescence of binaries, are inevitable consequences of the presence of SMBHs at the cores of galaxies. Pairs of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and…
We review the observed demographics and inferred evolution of supermassive black holes (BHs) found by dynamical modeling of spatially resolved kinematics. Most influential was the discovery of a tight correlation between BH mass and the…
Massive black holes (MBHs) in contrast to stellar mass black holes are expected to substantially change their properties over their lifetime. MBH masses increase by several order of magnitude over the Hubble time, as illustrated by Soltan's…
Contrary to supermassive and stellar-mass black holes (SBHs), the existence of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) with masses ranging between 10^{2-5} Msun has not yet been confirmed. The main problem in the detection is that the…
We present a novel, few-body computational framework designed to shed light on the likelihood of forming intermediate-mass (IM) and supermassive (SM) black holes (BHs) in nuclear star clusters (NSCs) through successive BH mergers, initiated…
The nano-hertz (nHz) stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB), generated by unresolved supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs), provides a unique probe of their population and its cosmic evolution. In this work, we explore the…
An enormous number of compact binary systems, spanning from stellar to supermassive levels, emit substantial gravitational waves during their final evolutionary stages, thereby creating a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB). We…
We present a series of simulations of the self--regulated growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galaxies via three different fueling mechanisms: major mergers, minor mergers, and disk instabilities. The SMBHs in all three scenarios…
Dynamical friction (DF) against stars and gas is thought to be an important mechanism for orbital evolution of massive black holes (MBHs) in merger remnant galaxies. Recent theoretical investigations however show that DF does not always…
We study the dynamical evolution of supermassive black holes (BHs) in merging galaxies on scales of hundreds of kpc to 10 pc, to identify the physical processes that aid or hinder the orbital decay of BHs. We present hydrodynamical…
Gravitational-wave (GW) recoil of merging supermassive black holes (SMBHs) may influence the co-evolution of SMBHs and their host galaxies. We examine this possibility using SPH/N-body simulations of gaseous galaxy mergers in which the…
Binary-black-hole (BBH) mergers can take place close to a supermassive black hole (SMBH) while being in a bound orbit around the SMBH. In this paper, we study such bound triple systems and show that including the strong gravity effects of…
In galactic centers, stars and binaries can be injected into low-angular-momentum orbits, resulting in close encounters with the central supermassive black hole (SMBH). Previous works have shown that under different conditions, such close…
We investigate the possible link between mergers and the enhanced activity of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centre of galaxies, by comparing the merger fraction of a local sample (0.003 =< z < 0.03) of active galaxies - 59 active…
The growing number of black hole binary (BHB) mergers detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) have the potential to enable an unprecedented characterization of the physical processes and astrophysical…