Related papers: Capture rate of weakly interacting massive particl…
The high stellar densities in the cores of globular clusters cause significant stellar interactions. These stellar interactions can produce close binary mass-transferring systems involving compact objects and their progeny, such as X-ray…
Most stars form in dense star clusters deeply embedded in residual gas. These objects must therefore be seen as the fundamental building blocks of galaxies. With this contribution some physical processes that act in the very early and also…
We use a sample of close galaxy pairs selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 4 (SDSS DR4) to investigate in what environments galaxy mergers occur and how the results of these mergers depend on differences in local galaxy…
We develop a semi-analytic model to investigate how accretion onto wide low-mass binary stars can result in a close high-mass binary system. The key ingredient is to allow mass accretion while limiting the gain in angular momentum. We…
The first phase of stellar evolution in the history of the Universe may be Dark Stars, powered by dark matter heating rather than by nuclear fusion. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which may be their own antipartners, collect inside…
The mm-wave continuum sources (MCS) in Ophiuchus have mutual collision rates less than their collapse rates by a factor of 10 to 100, suggesting most will form stars without further interactions. However, this ratio of rates would have…
Dark matter (DM) is predicted to be the dominant mass component in galaxies. In the central region of Early-type galaxies it is expected to account for a large amount of the total mass, although the stellar mass should still represent the…
We generalize the formalism for DM capture in celestial bodies to account for arbitrary mediator mass, and update the existing and projected astrophysical constraints on DM-nucleon scattering cross section from observations of neutron…
The relaxed distribution of stars around a massive black hole is known to follow a cusp profile $\rho(r)\propto r^{-\alpha}$ with characteristic slope $\alpha=7/4$. This follows from energy conservation and a scattering rate as given by two…
To date, the presence of dark matter (DM) can be judged only by its gravitational interaction on the visible matter. It is therefore important to find the consequences of this interaction, which can then help to determine both the DM…
Detecting dark matter as it streams through detectors on Earth relies on knowledge of its phase space density on a scale comparable to the size of our solar system. Numerical simulations predict that our Galactic halo contains an enormous…
The dark matter content of globular clusters, highly compact gravity-bound stellar systems, is unknown. It is also generally unknow*able*, due to their mass-to-light ratios typically ranging between 1$-$3 in solar units, accommodating a…
Exotic dark matter together with the vacuum energy or cosmological constant seem to dominate in the Universe. An even higher density of such matter seems to be gravitationally trapped in the Galaxy. Thus its direct detection is central to…
In this last paper in a series of three on weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter in the solar system, we focus on WIMPs bound to the system by gravitationally scattering off of planets. We present simulations of WIMP orbits…
We propose a dynamical mechanism for capturing stars around a massive black hole (MBH), which is based on the accumulation there of a very dense cluster of compact stellar remnants. This study is motivated by the presence of ~10 young…
To assess the effect of baryonic ``pinching'' of galaxy cluster dark matter (DM) haloes, cosmological (LCDM) TreeSPH simulations of the formation and evolution of two galaxy clusters have been performed, with and without baryons included.…
Winds of massive stars are an important ingredient in determining their evolution, final remnant mass, and feedback to the surrounding interstellar medium. We compare empirical results for OB star winds at low metallicity with theoretical…
We investigate the effect of a coupling between dark matter and dark energy on the rates for the direct detection of dark matter. The magnitude of the effect depends on the strength $\kappa$ of this new interaction relative to gravity. The…
We investigate the impact of asymmetric fermionic dark matter (DM) on the thermal evolution of neutron stars (NSs), considering a scenario where DM interacts with baryonic matter (BM) through gravity. Employing the two-fluid formalism, our…
We examine the first phase of the core accretion model, namely the dust growth/fragmentation in binary systems. In our model, a gas and dust disk is present around the primary star and is perturbed by the secondary. We study the effects of…