Related papers: Stellar Dynamics around Black Holes in Galactic Nu…
Based on a simple geometrical approach, we analyze the evolution of the Kozai-Lidov mechanism for stars around shrinking massive black hole binaries on circular orbits. We find that, due to a peculiar bifurcation pattern induced by the…
Mass and spin are the only two parameters needed to completely characterize black holes in General Relativity. However, the interaction between black holes and their environment is where complexity lies, as the relevant physical processes…
This paper constructs an analytic form for a triaxial potential that describes the dynamics of a wide variety of astrophysical systems, including the inner portions of dark matter halos, the central regions of galactic bulges, and young…
We suggest that most nearby active galactic nuclei are fed by a series of small--scale, randomly--oriented accretion events. Outside a certain radius these events promote rapid star formation, while within it they fuel the supermassive…
The region around the center of our Galaxy is very dense of stars. The kinematics of inner moving stars in the Galaxy (the so called S-stars) has been deeply studied by different research groups leading to the conclusion of the existence of…
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…
An important issue in the dynamics of neutron star binaries is whether tidal interaction can cause the individual stars to collapse into black holes during inspiral. To understand this issue better, we study the dynamics of a cluster of…
It is strongly believed that Andromeda's double nucleus signals a disk of stars revolving around its central super-massive black hole on eccentric Keplerian orbits with nearly aligned apsides. A self-consistent stellar dynamical origin for…
The motion of a stellar compact object around a supermassive black hole can be approximated by the motion of a spinning test particle. The equations of motion describing such systems are in general non-integrable, and therefore, chaotic…
The majority of galaxies are known to have supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at their core, which have a tremendous gravitational pull on the objects around them. When embedded within extended matter distributions such as prolate, shell-like…
The hierarchical galaxy formation picture suggests that super massive black holes (MBHs) observed in galactic nuclei today have grown from coalescence of massive black hole binaries (MBHB) after galaxy merging. Once the components of a MBHB…
We study spherical and disk clusters in a near-Keplerian potential of galactic centers or massive black holes. In such a potential orbit precession is commonly retrograde, i.e. direction of the orbit precession is opposite to the orbital…
Nuclear star clusters that surround supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galactic nuclei are thought to contain large numbers of black holes (BHs) and neutron stars (NSs), a fraction of which form binaries and could merge by Kozai-Lidov…
HST observations have revealed that compact sources exist at the centers of many, maybe even most, galaxies across the Hubble sequence. These sources are called "nuclei" or also "nuclear star clusters" (NCs), given that their structural…
Supermassive black holes dominate the gravitational potential in galactic nuclei. In these dense environments, stars follow nearly Keplerian orbits and see their orbital planes relax through the potential fluctuations generated by the…
Accretion onto black holes and compact stars brings material in a zone of strong gravitational and electromagnetic fields. We study dynamical properties of motion of electrically charged particles forming a highly diluted medium (a corona)…
In this paper we report results of collisional N-body simulations of the dynamical evolution of equal-mass star clusters containing a massive central black hole. Each cluster is composed of between 5,000 to 180,000 stars together with a…
Dense stellar clusters surround the supermassive black holes (SMBH) in galactic nuclei. Interactions within the cluster can alter the stellar orbits, occasionally driving a star into the SMBH's tidal radius where it becomes ruptured, or…
The light distribution in the disks of many galaxies is non-axisymmetric or `lopsided' with a spatial extent much larger along one half of a galaxy than the other, as in M101. Recent near-IR observations show that lopsidedness is common.…
Although the orbits of comparable mass, spinning black holes seem to defy simple decoding, we find a means to decipher all such orbits. The dynamics is complicated by extreme perihelion precession compounded by spin-induced precession. We…