Related papers: Fuelling Active Galactic Nuclei
We study the structure and evolution of the hyperaccreting disks and outflows in the gamma ray bursts central engines. The torus around a stellar mass black hole is composed of free nucleons, Helium, electron-positron pairs, and is cooled…
Supermassive black hole accretion and star formation appear intimately connected. I review the observational and theoretical evidence for this statement. I then discuss how focussed studies of two systems, our Galactic Center and the…
The disks of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) are expected to be populated by numerous stars, either formed in the outer regions of the disk via gravitational instability, or captured from the nearby nuclear star cluster. Regardless of their…
We present an analysis of the growth of black holes through accretion and bulges through star formation in 33 galaxies at the centers of cooling flows. Most of these systems show evidence of cavities in the intracluster medium (ICM)…
The Galactic Center is the closest galactic nucleus that can be studied with unprecedented angular resolution and sensitivity. We summarize recent basic observational results on Sagittarius A* and the conditions for star formation in the…
Neutron stars inspiralling into a stellar envelope can accrete at rates vastly exceeding the Eddington limit if the flow develops pressures high enough to allow neutrinos to radiate the released gravitational energy. It has been suggested…
The Galactic Center contains the most massive young clusters in the Galaxy and serves as the closest example of a massive starburst region. Our recent results suggest that the Galactic Center environment produces massive clusters with…
Warped accretion discs in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) exert a torque on the black hole that tends to align the rotation axis with the angular momentum of the outer disc. We compute the magnitude of this torque by solving numerically for…
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…
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are highly energetic astrophysical sources powered by accretion onto supermassive black holes in galaxies, which present unique observational signatures covering the full electromagnetic spectrum (and more) over…
Observational arguments suggest that the growth phases of the supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei have a characteristic timescale $\sim 10^5$ yr. We show that this is the timescale expected in the chaotic accretion picture of…
Nuclear activity in galaxies is closely connected to galactic mergers and supermassive black holes (SBH). Galactic mergers perturb substantially the dynamics of gas and stellar population in the merging galaxies, and they are expected to…
It is often assumed that the strong gravitational field of a super-massive black hole disrupts an adjacent molecular cloud preventing classical star formation in the deep potential well of the black hole. Yet, young stars have been observed…
High spatial resolution, near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy of the nuclear star cluster have given key new insights about the dynamics, evolution and mass distribution in the Milky Way Center. The central parsec is powered by a cluster…
We examine the radiatively driven mass accretion onto galactic nuclei due to the intensive radiation from circumnuclear starbursts. The radiation from a starburst not only contracts an inner gas disk by the radiation flux force, but also…
A long-standing question is whether active galactic nuclei (AGN) vary like Galactic black hole systems when appropriately scaled up by mass (refs 1-3). If so, we can then determine how AGN should behave on cosmological timescales by…
The luminosities of the centers of nearby elliptical galaxies are very low compared to models of thin disc accretion to their black holes at the Bondi rate, typically a few hundredths to a few tenths of a solar mass per year. This has…
We propose that the accretion disks fueling active galactic nuclei are supported vertically against gravity by a strong toroidal ($\phi-$direction) magnetic field that develops naturally as the result of an accretion disk dynamo. The…
There is considerable evidence that the circumnuclear regions of galaxies are intimately related to their host galaxies, most directly through their bars. There is also convincing evidence for relations between the properties of…
We explore here an scenario for massive black hole formation driven by stellar collisions in galactic nuclei, proposing a new formation regime of global instability in nuclear stellar clusters triggered by runaway stellar collisions. Using…