Related papers: Hypercompact stellar clusters: morphological rendi…
The high spatial resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has led to tremendous progress in many areas of astronomy. The ability of the HST to peer into the bright inner regions of galaxies and distinguish between globular clusters…
We present high-resolution mass reconstructions for five massive cluster-lenses spanning a redshift range from z = 0.18 - 0.57 utilizing archival Hubble Space Telescope data and applying galaxy-galaxy lensing techniques. These detailed mass…
Recent gravitational wave observations include possible detections of black hole - neutron star binary mergers. As with binary black hole mergers, numerical simulations help characterize the sources. For binary systems with neutron star…
We explore the ability of weak lensing surveys to locate massive clusters. We use both analytic models of dark matter halos and mock weak lensing surveys generated from a large cosmological N-body simulation. The analytic models describe…
Recent discoveries of black hole (BH) candidates in Galactic and extragalactic globular clusters (GCs) have ignited interest in understanding how BHs dynamically evolve in a GC and the number of BHs ($N_{\rm{BH}}$) that may still be…
In a star cluster with a sufficiently large escape velocity, black holes (BHs) that are produced by BH mergers can be retained, dynamically form new BH binaries, and merge again. This process can repeat several times and lead to significant…
At low redshift, massive black holes are found in the centers of almost all large elliptical galaxies, and also in many lower-mass systems. Their evolution is believed to be inextricably entangled with that of their host galaxies. On the…
The asymmetric emission of gravitational waves produced during the coalescence of a massive black hole (MBH) binary imparts a velocity "kick" to the system that can displace the hole from the center of its host. Here we study the…
Nuclear star clusters (NSCs) are dense, compact stellar systems only a few parsecs across, located at galaxy centers. Their small sizes make them difficult to resolve spatially. NSCs often coexist with massive black holes, and both trace…
The predicted rate of binary black hole mergers from galactic fields can vary over several orders of magnitude and is extremely sensitive to the assumptions of stellar evolution. But in dense stellar environments such as globular clusters,…
The ubiquity of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centers of nearby luminous galaxies can arise from the multiple mergers experienced by dark matter halos in hierarchical structure formation models, even if only a small fraction of…
We perform SPH+N-body cosmological simulations of massive disk galaxies, including a formalism for black hole seed formation and growth, and find that satellite galaxies containing supermassive black hole seeds are often stripped as they…
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…
Understanding whether the bulge or the halo provides the primary link to the growth of supermassive black holes has strong implications for galaxy evolution and supermassive black hole formation itself. In this paper, we approach this issue…
We discuss the latest results of numerical simulations following the orbital decay of massive black hole pairs in galaxy mergers. We highlight important differences between gas-poor and gas-rich hosts, and between orbital evolution taking…
Close encounters and physical collisions between stars in young dense clusters can result in new channels for stellar evolution, and may lead to the formation of very massive stars and black holes via runaway merging. We present some…
Galaxy clusters identified in optical imaging surveys suffer from projection effects: Physically unassociated galaxies along a cluster's line of sight can be counted as its members and boost the observed richness (the number of cluster…
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…
We extend the subhalo abundance matching method to assign galaxy color to subhalos. We separate a luminosity-binned subhalo sample into two groups by a secondary subhalo property which is presumed to be correlated with galaxy color. The two…
Supermassive black hole (SMBH) growth plausibly occurs via runaway astrophysical black hole mergers in nuclear star clusters that form intermediate mass black hole seeds at high redshifts. Such a model yields an order-of-magnitude higher…