10 papers
Orbital evolution of asymmetric binaries within accreting environments
Albert Radulea, Marcelo E. Rubio, Konstantinos Kritos +1
Extreme mass-ratio inspirals embedded in accretion disks provide a natural arena for studying the interplay between relativistic orbital dynamics and environmental effects. In this…
Primordial Black-Hole-Based Pathways to Little Red Dots
Valerio De Luca, Loris Del Grosso, Gabriele Franciolini +4
The James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered a population of compact, high-redshift sources, the Little Red Dots (LRDs), which may host supermassive black holes (BHs) significantly…
From nuclear star clusters to Little Red Dots: black hole growth, mergers, and tidal disruptions
Konstantinos Kritos, Joseph Silk
Little Red Dots, discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope, are hypothesized to be active galactic nuclei containing a supermassive black hole, possibly surrounded by a dense st…
Investigating the formation channel of GW231123: Population III stars or hierarchical mergers?
Federico Angeloni, Konstantinos Kritos, Raffaella Schneider +5
The gravitational wave event GW231123, with component black hole masses lying within or above the pair-instability mass gap, poses a significant challenge to current stellar evolut…
Predicting intermediate-mass black hole formation in star clusters with machine learning
Konstantinos Kritos, Digvijay Wadekar, Emanuele Berti
Whether intermediate-mass black holes reside in nearby star clusters has remained contested for decades. We address this question by training neural network and random forest regre…
Milky Way Globular Clusters: Nurseries for Dynamically-Formed Binary Black Holes
Federico Angeloni, Konstantinos Kritos, Raffaella Schneider +4
We present a novel self-consistent theoretical framework to characterize the formation, evolution, and merger sites of dynamically-formed black hole binaries, with a focus on expla…