Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Participants
- Preface
- Black holes, entropy, and information
- Gravitational waves from black-hole mergers
- Out-of-this-world physics: Black holes at future colliders
- Black holes in globular clusters
- Evolution of massive black holes
- Supermassive black holes in deep multiwavelength surveys
- Black-hole masses from reverberation mapping
- Black-hole masses from gas dynamics
- Evolution of supermassive black holes
- Black-hole masses of distant quasars
- The accretion history of supermassive black holes
- Strong field gravity and spin of black holes from broad iron lines
- Birth of massive black-hole binaries
- Dynamics around supermassive black holes
- Black-hole formation and growth: Simulations in general relativity
- Estimating the spins of stellar-mass black holes
- Stellar relaxation processes near the Galactic massive black hole
- Tidal disruptions of stars by supermassive black holes
- Where to look for radiatively inefficient accrection flows in low-luminosity AGN
- Making black holes visible: Accretion, radiation, and jets
Stellar relaxation processes near the Galactic massive black hole
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Participants
- Preface
- Black holes, entropy, and information
- Gravitational waves from black-hole mergers
- Out-of-this-world physics: Black holes at future colliders
- Black holes in globular clusters
- Evolution of massive black holes
- Supermassive black holes in deep multiwavelength surveys
- Black-hole masses from reverberation mapping
- Black-hole masses from gas dynamics
- Evolution of supermassive black holes
- Black-hole masses of distant quasars
- The accretion history of supermassive black holes
- Strong field gravity and spin of black holes from broad iron lines
- Birth of massive black-hole binaries
- Dynamics around supermassive black holes
- Black-hole formation and growth: Simulations in general relativity
- Estimating the spins of stellar-mass black holes
- Stellar relaxation processes near the Galactic massive black hole
- Tidal disruptions of stars by supermassive black holes
- Where to look for radiatively inefficient accrection flows in low-luminosity AGN
- Making black holes visible: Accretion, radiation, and jets
Summary
The massive black hole (MBH) in the Galactic Center (GC) and the stars around it form a unique stellar dynamics laboratory for studying how relaxation processes affect the distribution of stars and compact remnants and lead to close interactions between them and the MBH. Recent theoretical studies suggest that processes beyond “minimal” 2-body relaxation may operate and even dominate relaxation and its consequences in the GC. I describe loss-cone refilling by massive perturbers, strong mass segregation and resonant relaxation; review observational evidence that these processes play a role in the GC; and discuss some cosmic implications for the rates of gravitational wave emission events from compact remnants inspiraling into MBHs, and the coalescence timescales of binary MBHs.
Introduction
The M• ~ 4 × 106M⊙ MBH in the GC and the stars around it are the closest and observationally most accessible of such systems (Eisenhauer et al. 2005; Ghez et al. 2005). Observations of the GC thus offer a unique opportunity to study in great detail the effects of the MBH and its extreme environment on star formation, stellar evolution and stellar dynamics, and the interactions of stars and compact remnants with the MBH.
Here the focus is stellar relaxation processes. Relaxation plays an important role in a wide range of phenomena that involve close interactions with an MBH (the “losscone problem,” Section 1.1).
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- Black Holes , pp. 261 - 285Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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