Related papers: Hypervelocity intracluster stars ejected by superm…
Recent observations have found a 1700 km/s star [S5-HVS1] that was ejected from the Galactic Center approximately five million years ago. This star was likely produced by tidal disruption of a binary. In particular, the Galactic Center…
The young stars near the supermassive black hole at the galactic center follow orbits that are nearly random in orientation and that have an approximately thermal distribution of eccentricities, N(e) ~ e. We show that both of these…
We present direct N-body simulations, carried out with Nbody6++GPU, of young and compact low metallicity star clusters with $1.1\times 10^5$ stars, a velocity dispersion of $\sim$ 10 $\mathrm{km\,s^{-1}}$, a half mass radius $R_h=0.6$ pc,…
We have identified 38 candidates of intracluster planetary nebulae (ICPNe) in a $34'\times27'$ field in the core of the Virgo cluster based on the Suprime-Cam imaging through two narrow-band filters centered at the redshifted wavelengths of…
Most stars form in dense stellar environments. It is speculated that some dense star clusters may host intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), which may have formed from runaway collisions between high-mass stars, or from the mergers of less…
Young stars observed in the distant Galactic halo are usually thought to have formed elsewhere, either in the Galactic disk or perhaps the Galactic center, and subsequently ejected at high velocities to their current position. However, some…
In galactic centers, stars and binaries can be injected into low-angular-momentum orbits, resulting in close encounters with the central supermassive black hole (SMBH). Previous works have shown that under different conditions, such close…
We report the detection of five high-velocity stars in the core of the globular cluster NGC 2808. The stars lie on the the red giant branch and show total velocities between 40 and 45 km/s. For a core velocity dispersion sigma_c = 13.4…
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…
Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) discovered in the Milky Way (MW) halo are thought to be ejected from near the massive black hole (MBH) at the galactic centre. In this paper we investigate the spatial and velocity distributions of the HVSs which…
We simulate the inner 100pc of the Milky-Way Galaxy to study the formation and evolution of the population of star clusters and intermediate mass black holes. For this study we perform extensive direct N-body simulations of the star…
We describe a new survey for unbound hypervelocity stars (HVSs), stars traveling with such extreme velocities that dynamical ejection from a massive black hole (MBH) is their most likely origin. We investigate the possible contribution of…
We dissect giant Sc-Scd galaxies with Hubble Space Telescope photometry and Hobby-Eberly Telescope spectroscopy. We use HET's High Resolution Spectrograph (resolution = 15,000) to measure stellar velocity dispersions in the nuclear star…
We study the short- and long-term effects of an intermediate mass black hole (IMBH) on the orbits of stars bound to the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of the Milky Way. A regularized N-body code including post-Newtonian terms…
We investigate the consequences of superkicks on the population of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the Universe residing in brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs). There is strong observational evidence that BCGs grew prominently at late…
We expand upon the AMUSE-Virgo survey which imaged 100 early-type Virgo cluster galaxies with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and we place an emphasis on potential intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs). Virgo early-type galaxies with…
We develop a formalism for studying the dynamics of massive black hole binaries embedded in gravitationally-bound stellar cusps, and study the binary orbital decay by three-body interactions, the impact of stellar slingshots on the density…
Intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs) are among the most elusive objects in contemporary astrophysics. Both theoretical and observational evidence of their existence is subject of debate. Conversely, both theory and observations confirm the…
The last decade has seen the detection of fast moving stars in the Galactic halo, the so-called hypervelocity stars (HVSs). While the bulk of this population is likely the result of a close encounter between a stellar binary and the…
It has been argued that heavy binaries composed of neutron stars (NSs) and millisecond pulsars (MSPs) can end up in the outskirts of star clusters via an interaction with a massive black hole (BH) binary expelling them from the core. We…