Related papers: The Slingshot Revisited
The predicted rate of binary black hole mergers from galactic fields can vary over several orders of magnitude and is extremely sensitive to the assumptions of stellar evolution. But in dense stellar environments such as globular clusters,…
Blue stragglers in globular clusters are abnormally massive stars that should have evolved off the stellar main sequence long ago. There are two known processes that can create these objects: direct stellar collisions and binary evolution.…
The evolution of young compact star clusters is studied using N-body simulations in which both stellar evolution and physical collisions between stars are taken into account. The initial conditions are chosen to represent R136, a compact…
We investigate a population of primordial binaries during the initial stage of evolution of a star cluster. For our calculations we assume that equal mass stars form rapidly in a tidally truncated gas cloud, that $\sim10$\% of the stars are…
"Hard" massive black hole (MBH) binaries embedded in steep stellar cusps can shrink via three-body slingshot interactions. We show that this process will inevitably be accompanied by a burst of stellar tidal disruptions, at a rate that can…
The total mass of a distant star cluster is often derived from the virial theorem, using line-of-sight velocity dispersion measurements and half-light radii, under the implicit assumption that all stars are single (although it is known that…
In this paper we study the evolution of a primordial black hole binary (BHB) in a sample of over 1500 direct-summation $N-$body simulations of small-and intermediate-size isolated star clusters as proxies of galactic open clusters. The BHBs…
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…
In this paper, we study the formation and dynamical evolution of black hole-black hole (BH-BH) binaries in young star clusters (YSCs), by means of N-body simulations. The simulations include metallicity-dependent recipes for stellar…
Globular clusters contain many stars with surface abundance patterns indicating contributions from hydrogen burning products, as seen in the anti-correlated elemental abundances of e.g. sodium and oxygen, and magnesium and aluminium.…
We construct evolutionary tracks for massive black hole binaries (MBHBs) embedded in a surrounding distribution of stars. The dynamics of the binary is evolved by taking into account the erosion of the central stellar cusp bound to the…
We simulate black hole binary interactions to examine the probability of mergers and black hole growth and gravitational radiation signals using a specific initial distribution of masses for black holes in globular clusters and a simple…
The population of binary black hole mergers identified through gravitational waves has uncovered unexpected features in the intrinsic properties of black holes in the universe. One particularly surprising and exciting result is the possible…
Centers of galaxies host both a supermassive black hole and a dense stellar cluster. Such an environment should lead to stellar collisions, possibly at very high velocities so that the total energy involved is of the same order as…
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…
Abundance anomalies observed in globular cluster stars indicate pollution with material processed by hydrogen burning. Two main sources have been suggested: asymptotic giant branch stars and massive stars rotating near the break-up limit.…
Binary stars produce an array of dramatic astrophysical phenomena. They allow us to probe stellar structure, nuclear physics, and gravitational wave physics. They also produce the powerful supernovae that allow us to measure the scale of…
We present models of realistic globular clusters with post-Newtonian dynamics for black holes. By modeling the relativistic accelerations and gravitational-wave emission in isolated binaries and during three- and four-body encounters, we…
Because the majority of massive stars are born as members of close binary systems, populations of massive main-sequence stars contain stellar mergers and products of binary mass transfer. We simulate populations of massive stars accounting…
The relaxed distribution of stars around a massive black hole is known to follow a cusp profile $\rho(r)\propto r^{-\alpha}$ with characteristic slope $\alpha=7/4$. This follows from energy conservation and a scattering rate as given by two…