Related papers: Runaway Merging of Black Holes: Analytical Constra…
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…
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…
The formation and evolution of binary black holes (BH) is studied using the modern evolutionary scenario for very massive stars with high mass loss (Vanbeveren et al. 1998). Main sequence stars with masses $M>35 M_\odot$ are assumed to form…
The runaway collision scenario is one of the most promising mechanisms to explain the formation of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) in young dense star clusters. On the other hand, the massive stars that participate in the runaway…
Close encounters and physical collisions between stars in young dense clusters may lead to the formation of very massive stars and black holes via runaway merging. We examine critically some details of this process, using N-body simulations…
The runaway merger scenario is one of the most promising mechanisms to explain the formation of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) in young dense star clusters (SCs). On the other hand, the massive stars that participate in the runaway…
Star clusters can interact and merge in galactic discs, halos, or centers. We present direct N-body simulations of binary mergers of star clusters with $M_{\star} = 2.7 \times 10^4 \: \mathrm{M_{\odot}}$ each, using the N-body code BIFROST…
A luminous X-ray source is associated with a cluster (MGG-11) of young stars \~200pc from the center of the starburst galaxy M82. The properties of the X-ray source are best explained by a black hole with a mass of at least 350Msun, which…
We present a new study of the collisional runaway scenario to form an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH, MBH > 100 Msun) at the centre of a young, compact stellar cluster. The first phase is the formation of a very dense central core of…
If primordial black holes (PBH) are present in the early universe, their contribution to the energy budget grows relative to that of radiation and generically becomes dominant unless the initial abundance is exponentially small. This black…
In the present paper we combine an N-body code that simulates the dynamics of young dense stellar systems with a massive star evolution handler that accounts in a realistic way for the effects of stellar wind mass loss. We discuss two…
LIGO and Virgo have reported the detection of GW190521, from the merger of a binary black hole (BBH) with a total mass around $150$ M$_\odot$. While current stellar models limit the mass of any black hole (BH) remnant to about $40 - 50$…
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…
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…
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…
GW231123, the most massive binary black hole (BBH) merger detected by LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA, highlights the need to understand the origins of massive, high-spin stellar black holes (BHs). Dense star clusters provide natural environments for…
We study the formation of massive black holes in the first star clusters. We first locate star-forming gas clouds in proto-galactic haloes of $\gtrsim \!10^7\,{\rm M}_{\odot}$ in cosmological hydrodynamics simulations and use them to…
We explore hierarchical black hole (BH) mergers in nuclear star clusters (NSCs), globular clusters (GCs) and young star clusters (YSCs), accounting for both original and dynamically assembled binary BHs (BBHs). We find that the median mass…
Intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs) in the mass range $10^2-10^5\,\mathrm{M_{\odot}}$ bridge the gap between stellar black holes (BHs) and supermassive BHs. Here, we investigate the possibility that IMBHs form in young star clusters via…
It is speculated that a merger of two massive stellar-origin BHs in a dense stellar environment may lead to the formation of a massive BH in the pair-instability mass gap (50-135 Msun). Such a merger-formed BH is expected to typically have…