Close encounters of black holes

Close encounters of three black holes

Simulating black hole white dwarf encounters

The existence of supermassive black holes lurking in the centers of galaxies and of stellar binary systems containing a black hole with a few solar masses has been established beyond reasonable doubt. The idea that black holes of intermediate masses (∼ 1000 M ) may exist in globular star clusters has gained credence over recent years but no conclusive evidence has been established yet. An attra...

Canaries in a Coal Mine: Using Globular Clusters to Place Limits on Massive Black Holes in the Galactic Halo

We explore the possibility that massive black holes comprise a significant fraction of the dark matter of our galaxy by studying the dissolution of galactic globular clusters bombarded by them. In our simulations, we evolve the clusters along a sequence of King models determined by changes of state resulting from collisions with the black holes. We include mass loss in collisions as well as the...

Growing Intermediate-Mass Black Holes with Gravitational Waves

Title of Dissertation: Growing Intermediate-Mass Black Holes with Gravitational Waves Kayhan Gültekin, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Professor M. Coleman Miller Department of Astronomy We present results of numerical simulations of sequences of binary-single scattering events of black holes in dense stellar environments. The simulations cover a wide range of mass ratios f...

Three-Body Encounters of Black Holes in Globular Clusters

Evidence has been mounting for the existence of black holes with masses from 102 to 104 M⊙ associated with stellar clusters. Such intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) will encounter other black holes in the dense cores of these clusters. The binaries produced in these interactions will be perturbed by other objects as well thus changing the orbital characteristics of the binaries. These binari...