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Related papers: IMBH Progenitors from Stellar Collisions in Dense …

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We investigate the consequences of a model of the assembly and growth of massive black holes from primordial seeds, remnants of the first generation of stars in a hierarchical structure formation scenario. Our model traces the build-up of…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-10 Marta Volonteri , Rosalba Perna

Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) have masses of about 100 to 100,000 solar masses. They remain elusive. Observing IMBHs in present-day globular clusters (GCs) would validate a formation channel for seed black holes in the early…

Spectroscopic and photometric observations show that many globular clusters host multiple stellar populations, challenging the common paradigm that globular clusters are "simple stellar populations" composed of stars of uniform age and…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-18 Enrico Vesperini , Stephen L. W. McMillan , Annibale D'Ercole , Francesca D'Antona

We consider spherical stellar clusters with a broad mass function and a relaxation time short enough so that the segregation of massive stars toward the centre occurs before they have time to evolve off the main sequence. The relaxational…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Marc Freitag , M. Atakan Gürkan , Frederic A. Rasio

Observations suggest that star clusters often form in binaries or larger bound groups. Therefore, mergers between two clusters are likely to occur. If these clusters both harbor an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH; 10^{2-4} Msun) in their…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-11 Pau Amaro-Seoane , Marc Freitag

Dense stellar environments like nuclear star clusters (NSCs) can dynamically assemble gravitational wave (GW) sources. We consider a population of single stellar mass black holes (BHs) in the inner $0.1$~pc of a NSC surrounding a $4 \times…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-02-10 Amanda Newton , Sanaea C. Rose , Fulya Kıroğlu , Bao-Minh Hoang , Frederic A. Rasio

Nuclear star clusters (NSCs) are dense stellar clusters observed in galactic nuclei, typically hosting a central massive black hole. Here we study the possible formation and evolution of NSCs through the inspiral of multiple star clusters…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-19 Alessandra Mastrobuono-Battisti , Hagai B. Perets , Abraham Loeb

Motivated by JWST observations of dense, clumpy and clustered high redshift star formation, we simulate the hierarchical assembly of nine $M_{\mathrm{cl}}=10^6 M_\odot$ star clusters using the BIFROST N-body code. Our low metallicity models…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-09-08 Antti Rantala , Thorsten Naab

We study the early dynamical evolution of young, dense star clusters using Monte Carlo simulations for systems with up to N~10^7 stars. Rapid mass segregation of massive main-sequence stars and the development of the Spitzer instability can…

Astrophysics · Physics 2010-04-06 M. Atakan Gürkan , Marc Freitag , Frederic A. Rasio

Recent observational studies of ultra-compact dwarf galaxies (UCDs) have discovered massive black holes (MBHs) with masses of more than ${10^6~\rm M_\odot}$, in their central regions. We here consider that these MBHs can be formed through…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-06-17 Henriette Wirth , Kenji Bekki

Massive black holes in the centers of galaxies today must have grown by several orders of magnitude from seed black holes formed at early times. Detecting a population of intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs) can provide constraints on…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-10-28 Tiziana Di Matteo , Yueying Ni , Nianyi Chen , Rupert Croft , Simeon Bird , Fabio Pacucci , Angelo Ricarte , Michael Tremmel

Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) are believed to be the missing link between the supermassive black holes (BHs) found at the centers of massive galaxies and BHs formed through stellar core collapse. One of the proposed mechanisms for…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-03-14 Rujuta A. Purohit , Giacomo Fragione , Frederic A. Rasio , Grayson C. Petter , Ryan C. Hickox

We perform fully relativistic simulations of the head-on collisions between intermediate-mass black holes and very massive stars. Such collisions are expected to occur in dense stellar clusters and may play an important role in growing the…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-03-25 Thomas W. Baumgarte , Stuart L. Shapiro

In this paper we report results of collisional N-body simulations of the dynamical evolution of equal-mass star clusters containing a massive central black hole. Each cluster is composed of between 5,000 to 180,000 stars together with a…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-10 Holger Baumgardt , Junichiro Makino , Toshikazu Ebisuzaki

Most stellar evolution models predict that black holes (BHs) should not exist above approximately $50-70$ M$_\odot$, the lower limit of the pair-instability mass gap. However, recent LIGO/Virgo detections indicate the existence of BHs with…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-07-07 Sanaea C. Rose , Smadar Naoz , Re'em Sari , Itai Linial

Black holes formed in dense star clusters, where dynamical interactions are frequent, may have fundamentally different properties than those formed through isolated stellar evolution. Theoretical models for single star evolution predict a…

Using the Next Generation Very Large Array (ngVLA), we will make a comprehensive inventory of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) in hundreds of globular cluster systems out to a distance of 25 Mpc. IMBHs have masses of about 100 to…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-06-18 J. M. Wrobel , J. C. A. Miller-Jones , K. E. Nyland , T. J. Maccarone

We study the growth rate of stars via stellar collisions in dense star clusters, calibrating our analytic calculations with direct N-body simulations of up to 65536 stars, performed on the GRAPE family of special-purpose computers. We find…

Astrophysics · Physics 2008-11-26 Simon F. Portegies Zwart , Steve L. W. McMillan

Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) with masses below ($2 \times 10^5 M_{\odot}$) are pivotal in understanding the origin and growth mechanisms of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galactic nuclei. This study focuses on the search and…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-10-03 V. Goradzhanov , I. Chilingarian , M. Demianenko , I. Katkov , K. Grishin , V. Toptun , E. Rubtsov , D. Gasymov , I. Kuzmin

Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), with masses between roughly $10^2\,M_\odot$ and $10^5\,M_\odot$, represent a largely uncharted component of the black-hole (BH) population. They are theoretically predicted to form in several…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-12-17 R. Pascale , G. Battaglia