Related papers: Squeezars: Tidally powered stars orbiting a massiv…
It has long been believed that accretion onto supermassive black holes powers quasars, but there has been relatively few observational constraints on the spins of the black holes. We address this problem by estimating the average radiative…
In four-dimensional spacetime, moons around black holes generate low-amplitude tides, and the energy extracted from the hole's rotation is always smaller than the gravitational radiation lost to infinity. Thus, moons orbiting a black hole…
Three recent global simulations of tidal disruption events (TDEs) have produced, using different numerical techniques and parameters, very similar pictures of their dynamics. In typical TDEs, after the star is disrupted by a supermassive…
Tidal disruption events occur rarely in any individual galaxy. Over the last decade, however, time-domain surveys have begun to accumulate statistical samples of these flares. What dynamical processes are responsible for feeding stars to…
Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, exhibits frequent short-duration flares with luminosity greater than 1e34 erg/s across multiple wavelengths. The origin of the flares is still unknown. We revisited the…
The tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole (SMBH) is a highly energetic event with consequences dependent on the degree to which the star plunges inside the SMBH's tidal sphere. We introduce a new analytic model for tidal…
We study the probability of close encounters between stars from a nuclear cluster and a massive black hole. The gravitational field of the system is dominated by the black hole in its sphere of influence. It is further modified by the…
A tidal disruption event (TDE) ensues when a star passes too close to the supermassive black hole (SMBH) in a galactic center and is ripped apart by the tidal field of the SMBH. The gaseous debris produced in a TDE can power a bright…
A star that wanders too close to a massive black hole (BH) is shredded by the BH's tidal gravity. Stellar gas falls back to the BH, releasing a flare of energy. In anticipation of upcoming transient surveys, we predict the light curves and…
A star orbiting a supermassive black hole can be tidally disrupted if the black hole's gravitational tidal field exceeds the star's self gravity at pericenter. Some of this stellar tidal debris can become gravitationally bound to the black…
Many astrophysical environments, from star clusters and globular clusters to the disks of Active Galactic Nuclei, are characterized by frequent interactions between stars and the compact objects that they leave behind. Here, using a suite…
There is abundant evidence that heating processes in the central regions of elliptical galaxies has both prevented large-scale cooling flows and assisted in the expulsion of metal rich gas. We now know that each such spheroidal system…
Observations of high-redshift quasars at z>6 imply that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with masses over a billion solar masses were in place less than 1 Gyr after the Big Bang. If these SMBHs assembled from "seed" BHs left behind by the…
For a density that is not too sharply peaked towards the center, the local tidal field becomes compressive in all three directions. Available gas can then collapse and form a cluster of stars in the center, including or even being dominated…
Hycean planets -- exoplanets with substantial water ice layers, deep surface oceans, and hydrogen-rich atmospheres -- are thought to be favorable environments for life. Due to a relative paucity of atmospheric greenhouse gases, hycean…
The shearing motion of tidal flows that are excited in non-equilibrium binary stars transform kinetic energy into heat via a process referred to as tidal heating. In this paper we aim to explore the way tidal heating affects the stellar…
Quasars are widely believed to be powered by accretion onto supermassive black holes and there is now considerable evidence for a link between mergers, quasars and the formation of spheroids. Cattaneo, Haehnelt & Rees (1999) have…
The density of stars in galactic bulges is often observed to be flat or slowly rising inside the influence radius of the supermassive black hole (SMBH). Attributing the dynamical friction force to stars moving more slowly than the test…
We consider a model for quasar formation in which massive black holes are formed and fuelled largely by the accretion of hot gas during the process of galaxy formation. In standard hierarchical collapse models, objects about the size of…
A massive black hole resides in the center of most, perhaps all galaxies. The one in the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, provides a uniquely accessible laboratory for studying in detail the connections and interactions between a…