Related papers: Galactic nuclei formation and activity induced by …
I review the status of massive star formation theories: accretion from collapsing, massive, turbulent cores; competitive accretion; and stellar collisions. I conclude the observational and theoretical evidence favors the first of these…
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…
We present a series of $N$-body simulations representing the evolution of a galactic nucleus and its stellar content in a nearly one-to-one representation. The aim of this suite of simulations is to shed light on the interplay between…
Properties of normal galactic star formation, including the density dependence, threshold density, turbulent scaling relations, and clustering properties, are applied to the formation of galactic bulges. One important difference is that the…
The origin of metal-rich, highly flattened, and rapidly rotating disk globular cluster system in the Galaxy is one of longstanding issues in the context of the Galaxy formation. Our numerical simulations suggest a new ``two-fold'' scenario…
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…
Galaxies with Milky Way-like stellar masses have a wide range of bulge and black hole masses; in turn, these correlate with other properties such as star formation history. While many processes may drive bulge formation, major and minor…
Mergers between stellar-mass black holes will be key sources of gravitational radiation for ground-based detectors. However, the rates of these events are highly uncertain, given that such systems are invisible. One formation scenario…
Many possible scenarios for the formation of multiple stellar populations (MSP) in globular clusters (GCs) have been discussed so far, including the involvement of asymptotic giant branch stars, fast rotating main sequence stars, very…
The most massive globular cluster in the Milky Way, omega Centauri, is thought to be the remaining core of a disrupted dwarf galaxy, as expected within the model of hierarchical merging. It contains several stellar populations having…
A new model for the formation of active galaxies is described. A key feature of this model is the idea that the birth of black holes in the centers of supergiant galaxies is strongly influenced by the large-scale distribution of matter in…
We summarize some recent results from our observational campaign to study the central regions of spiral galaxies of late Hubble type (Scd - Sm). These disk-dominated, bulgeless galaxies have an apparently uneventful merger history. The…
A significant fraction of local galaxies show evidence of nuclear activity. I argue that the bulk of this activity, while energetically not remarkable, derives from accretion onto a central massive black hole. The statistics of nearby…
A significant fraction of clusters of galaxies are observed to have substructure, which implies that merging between clusters and subclusters is a rather common physical process of cluster formation. It still remains unclear how cluster…
Interacting galaxies often have complexes of hundreds of young stellar clusters of individual masses $\sim 10^{4-6}~M_\odot$ in regions that are a few hundred parsecs across. These cluster complexes interact dynamically, and their…
The centers of stellar spheroids are often marked by the presence of nucleated central regions, called nuclear star clusters (NSCs). The origin of NSCs is still unclear. Here we investigate the possibility that NSCs originate from the…
I discuss a search for red giant stars in the Galactic halo with light-element abundances similar to second-generation globular cluster stars, and discuss the implications of such a population for globular cluster formation models and the…
Recent observations indicate that the progenitors of globular clusters (GCs) at high redshifts had high average stellar surface densities above $10^5\, \mathrm{M}_\odot\, \mathrm{pc}^{-2}$. The internal structure and kinematics of the…
Young, massive star clusters are the most notable and significant end products of violent star-forming episodes triggered by galaxy collisions, mergers, and close encounters. The question remains, however, whether or not at least a fraction…
Supermassive black holes have been discovered at the centers of galaxies, and also in globular clusters. The data shows correlations between the black hole mass and the elliptical galaxy mass or globular cluster mass. It is shown that this…