Dynamics around supermassive black holes

Authors: Alessia Gualandris, David Merritt

arXiv: 0708.3083v1 - DOI (astro-ph)
Invited talk. To appear in "2007 STScI Spring Symposium: Black Holes", eds. M. Livio & A. M. Koekemoer. (Cambridge University Press, in press) 26 pages, 12 figures

Abstract: The dynamics of galactic nuclei reflects the presence of supermassive black holes (SBHs) in many ways. Single SBHs act as sinks, destroying a mass in stars equal to their own mass in roughly one relaxation time and forcing nuclei to expand. Formation of binary SBHs displaces a mass in stars roughly equal to the binary mass, creating low-density cores and ejecting hyper-velocity stars. Gravitational radiation recoil can eject coalescing binary SBHs from nuclei, resulting in offset SBHs and lopsided cores. We review recent work on these mechanisms and discuss the observable consequences.

Submitted to arXiv on 23 Aug. 2007

Explore the paper tree

Click on the tree nodes to be redirected to a given paper and access their summaries and virtual assistant

Also access our AI generated Summaries, or ask questions about this paper to our AI assistant.

Look for similar papers (in beta version)

By clicking on the button above, our algorithm will scan all papers in our database to find the closest based on the contents of the full papers and not just on metadata. Please note that it only works for papers that we have generated summaries for and you can rerun it from time to time to get a more accurate result while our database grows.