Orbital alignment and mass segregation in galactic nuclei via vector resonant relaxation

Abstract

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 stellar cluster itself. For typical astrophysical galactic nuclei, the most likely outcome of this vector resonant relaxation (VRR) is that the orbital planes of the most massive stars spontaneously self-align within a narrow disc. We present a maximum entropy method to systematically determine this long-term distribution of orientations and use it for a wide range of stellar orbital parameters and initial conditions. The heaviest stellar objects are found to live within a thin equatorial disk. The thickness of this disk depends on the stars' initial mass function, and on the geometry of the initial cluster. This work highlights a possible (indirect) novel method to constrain the distribution of intermediate mass black holes in galactic nuclei.

14 pages, 17 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Black Hole Binary Formation in AGN Discs: From Isolation to Merger
• On the Jacobi capture origin of binaries with applications to the Earth-Moon system and black holes in galactic nuclei
• Constraints on the Galactic Centre environment from \textit{Gaia} hypervelocity stars III: Insights on a possible companion to Sgr A*
• Black Hole Discs and Spheres in Galactic Nuclei -- Exploring the Landscape of Vector Resonant Relaxation Equilibria
• Non-resonant relaxation of rotating globular clusters
• Dynamics of point-vortex type systems near thermal equilibrium: relaxation or not?