Related papers: The Slingshot Revisited
This short document illustrates QLUSTER: a toy model for populations of binary black holes in dense astrophysical environments. QLUSTER is a simple tool to investigate the occurrence and properties of hierarchical black-hole mergers…
To explain both the dynamics of a globular cluster and its production of gravitational waves from coalescing binary black holes, it is necessary to understand its population of dynamically-formed (or, `three-body') binaries. We provide a…
Stars often reside in binary configurations. The nuclear star cluster surrounding the supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the Galactic Center (GC) is expected to include a binary population. In this dense environment, a binary frequently…
The total mass of distant star clusters is often derived from the virial theorem, using line-of-sight velocity dispersion measurements and half-light radii. Although most stars form in binary systems, this is mostly ignored when…
In young star clusters, the density can be high enough and the velocity dispersion low enough for stars to collide and merge with a significant probability. This has been suggested as a possible way to build up the high-mass portion of the…
Stellar models of massive single stars are still plagued by major uncertainties. Testing and calibrating against observations is essential for their reliability. For this purpose one preferably uses observed stars that have never…
The centres of galaxies host nuclear stellar clusters, supermassive black holes, or both. The origin of this dichotomy is still a mystery. Nuclear stellar clusters are the densest stellar system in the Universe, so they are ideal places for…
The discovery of multiple stellar populations in globular clusters has implications for all the aspects of the study of these stellar systems. In this paper, by means of N-body simulations, we study the evolution of binary stars in…
Given the stellar density near the galactic center, close encounters between compact object binaries and the supermassive black hole are a plausible occurrence. We present results from a numerical study of close to 13 million such…
The centers of galaxies host a supermassive black hole surrounded by a dense stellar cluster. The cluster is expected to develop mass segregation, in which gravitational scatterings among the stars cause heavier objects to sink closer to…
Star clusters - open and globulars - experience dynamical evolution on time scales shorter than their age. Consequently, open and globular clusters provide us with unique dynamical laboratories for learning about two-body relaxation, mass…
We explore the effects of dynamical evolution in dense clusters on the companion mass ratio distribution (CMRD) of binary stars. Binary systems are destroyed by interactions with other stars in the cluster, lowering the total binary…
This paper reviews our knowledge on binary central stars of planetary nebulae and presents some personal opinions regarding their evolution. Three types of interactions are distinguished: type I, where the binary companion induces the mass…
Most stars form in a clustered environment. Both single and binary stars will sometimes encounter planetary systems in such crowded environments. Encounter rates for binaries may be larger than for single stars, even for binary fractions as…
[Abridged] In galactic nuclei with sufficiently short relaxation times, binary supermassive black holes can evolve beyond their stalling radii via continued interaction with stars. We study this "collisional" evolutionary regime using both…
Fomalhaut is a triple system, with all components widely separated (~1E5 au). Such widely separated binaries are thought to form during cluster dissolution, but that process is unlikely to form such a triple system. We explore an…
Two of the dominant channels to produce the black-hole binary mergers observed by LIGO and Virgo are believed to be the isolated evolution of stellar binaries in the field and dynamical formation in star clusters. Their relative efficiency…
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…
In this letter we study the eccentricity evolution of a massive black hole (MBH) binary (MBHB) embedded in a rotating stellar cusp. Following the observation that stars on counter-rotating (with respect to the MBHB) orbits extract angular…
The new approach outlined in Paper I (Spurzem \& Giersz 1996) to follow the individual formation and evolution of binaries in an evolving, equal point-mass star cluster is extended for the self-consistent treatment of relaxation and close…