Related papers: Beyond Causal Discovery for Astronomy: Learning Me…
Context. The assembly history of the stellar component of a massive elliptical galaxy is closely related to that of its dark matter halo. Measuring how the properties of galaxies correlate with their halo mass can help understand their…
Observations of stellar kinematics, gas dynamics and masers around galactic nuclei have now firmly established that many galaxies host central supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with masses in the range $10^6 \sim 10^9$M$_{\odot}$. However,…
Spatially resolved images of debris disks frequently reveal complex morphologies such as gaps, spirals, and warps. Most existing models for explaining such morphologies focus on the role of massive perturbers (i.e. planets, stellar…
Deep exposure imaging of early-type galaxies (ETGs) are revealing the second-order complexity of these objects, which have been long considered uniform, dispersion-supported spheroidals. "Fine structure" features (e.g. ripples, plumes,…
During a galaxy merger, the supermassive black hole (SMBH) in each galaxy is thought to sink to the center of the potential and form a supermassive black hole binary; this binary can eject stars via 3-body scattering, bringing the SMBHs…
Black hole masses predicted from the Mbh-sigma relationship conflict with those predicted from the Mbh-L relationship for the most luminous galaxies, such as brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs). This is because stellar velocity dispersion,…
We investigate the dynamical evolution of an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) in a nuclear star cluster hosting a supermassive black hole (SMBH) and both a spherical and a flattened disk-like distribution of stellar-mass objects. We use…
The role of baryonic physics, star formation, and stellar feedback, in shaping the galaxies and their host halos is an evolving topic. The dark matter aspects are illustrated in this work by showing distribution features in a…
As the earliest relics of star formation episodes of the Universe, the most massive galaxies are the key to our understanding of the stellar population, cosmic structure, and SMBH evolution. However, the details of their formation histories…
We present axisymmetric, orbit superposition models for 12 galaxies using data taken with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and ground-based observatories. In each galaxy, we detect a central black hole (BH) and measure its mass to…
The detection of Intermediate-Mass Black Holes (IMBHs) in dwarf galaxies is crucial to closing the gap in the wide mass distribution of black holes ($\sim 3 \, \rm M_{\odot}$ to $\sim 5 \times 10^{10} \, \rm M_{\odot}$). IMBHs originally…
Recently, the relation between the masses of the black hole ($M_{BH}$) and the host galaxy ($M_{host}$) in quasars has been probed down to the parameter space of $M_{BH}\sim10^8 M_\odot$ and $M_{host}\sim10^{11} M_\odot$ at z $<$ 0.5. In…
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are nowadays believed to reside in most local galaxies, and the available data show an empirical correlation between bulge luminosity - or stellar velocity dispersion - and black hole mass, suggesting a…
There is an intimate link between supermassive black hole (SMBH) mass (M) and the stellar velocity dispersion (sigma) of the host bulge. This has a fundamental impact on our understanding of galaxy and SMBH formation and evolution. However,…
The putative ubiquity of massive black holes (MBH) at the center of galaxies, and the hierarchical progress of structure formation along the cosmic history, together necessarily imply the existence of a large population of cosmic MBH…
We examine the scaling relations between the mass of a supermassive black hole (SMBH) and its host galaxy properties at $1.2<z<1.7$ using both observational data and simulations. Recent measurements of 32 X-ray-selected broad-line Active…
Independent Component Analysis (ICA) aims to recover independent latent variables from observed mixtures thereof. Causal Representation Learning (CRL) aims instead to infer causally related (thus often statistically dependent) latent…
We formulate a causal extension to the recently introduced paradigm of instance-wise feature selection to explain black-box visual classifiers. Our method selects a subset of input features that has the greatest causal effect on the models…
The dark and dynamic parts of the Galaxy, including the bulk shape and movement of the Galactic Bulge and characteristics of dark compact object populations, such as a hypothetical population of primordial black holes (PBHs), are difficult…
Motivated by observational searches for massive black hole (MBH) pairs at kiloparsec separations we develop a semi-analytic model to describe their orbital evolution under the influence of stellar and gaseous dynamical friction (DF). The…