Related papers: Stellar Collisions and Black Hole Formation in Den…
The detection of gravitational waves emitted during a neutron star - black hole merger and the associated electromagnetic counterpart will provide a wealth of information about stellar evolution nuclear matter, and General Relativity. While…
We present preliminary results of the application of a new sophisticated code which allows high precision integration of orbits of stars belonging to a dense stellar system moving in the vicinity of a massive black hole. This mimics the…
Star cluster formation in giant molecular clouds involves the local collapse of the cloud into small gas-rich subclusters, which can then subsequently collide and merge to build up the final star cluster(s). In this paper, we simulate…
Stars are most likely to merge or collide in regions of the highest stellar densities, and our own Galactic Center contains many stars packed into a relatively small volume -- even the ambient stellar number density in the central 50 pc is…
Supermassive black holes are found in most galactic nuclei. A large fraction of these nuclei also contain a nuclear stellar cluster surrounding the black hole. Here we consider the idea that the nuclear stellar cluster formed first and that…
The formation of massive stars in close binary systems is complicated due to their high radiation pressure, the crowded environment and the expected minimum separation for fragmentation being many times greater than the orbital separation.…
Galactic nuclei host central massive objects either in the form of supermassive black holes or nuclear stellar clusters. Recent investigations have shown that both components co-exist in at least a few galaxies. In this paper we explore the…
Young star clusters with masses similar to those of classical old globular clusters are observed not only in starbursts, mergers or otherwise disturbed galaxies, but also in normal spiral galaxies. Some young clusters with masses as high as…
The growth of supermassive black holes by merging and accretion in hierarchical models of galaxy formation is studied by means of Monte Carlo simulations. A tight linear relation between masses of black holes and masses of bulges arises if…
Galaxy mergers are common processes in the Universe. As a large fraction of galaxies hosts at their centres a central supermassive black hole (SMBH), mergers can lead to the formation of a supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB). The…
The recent detection of GW190521 stimulated ideas on how to populate the predicted black hole pair-instability mass gap. One proposed scenario is the dynamical merger of two stars below the pair instability regime forming a star with a…
Star clusters stand at the intersection of much of modern astrophysics: the interstellar medium, gravitational dynamics, stellar evolution, and cosmology. Here we review observations and theoretical models for the formation, evolution, and…
Nuclear star clusters, which fragment into metal-poor stars in situ at the centers of protogalaxies, provide ideal environments for the formation of intermediate-mass black holes with masses $10^3-10^6M_\odot$. We utilize the semianalytic…
We review the main physical processes that lead to the formation of stellar binary black holes (BBHs) and to their merger. BBHs can form from the isolated evolution of massive binary stars. The physics of core-collapse supernovae and the…
Clusters are the dense inner regions of a wide-spread hierarchy of young stellar structures. They often reveal a continuation of this hierarchy inside of them, to smaller scales, when they are young, but orbital mixing eventually erases…
Galaxy interactions are known to trigger starbursts. Young massive star clusters formed in interacting galaxies and mergers may become young globular clusters. The ages of these clusters can provide clues about the timing of…
Globular star clusters contain thousands to millions of old stars packed within a region only tens of light years across. Their high stellar densities make it very probable that their member stars will interact or collide. There has been…
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…
Young star clusters are likely the most common birthplace of massive stars across cosmic time and influence the formation of compact binaries in several ways. Here, we simulate the formation of black hole -- neutron star binaries (BHNSs) in…
During their evolution, star clusters undergo mass segregation, by which the orbits of the most massive stars shrink, while the lighter stars move outwards from the cluster centre. In this context, recent observations and dynamical…