Young massive clusters (YMCs) are dense aggregates of young stars that form the
fundamental building blocks of galaxies. Several examples exist in the Milky Way Galaxy …

Black hole binaries with extreme (≳ 10 4: 1) or intermediate (∼ 10 2–10 4: 1) mass ratios
are among the most interesting gravitational wave sources that are expected to be detected …

Context. Many of the open clusters listed in modern catalogues were initially reported by
visual astronomers as apparent overdensities of bright stars. As observational techniques …

Understanding the link between massive (≳ 30 M⊙) stellar black holes (BHs) and their
progenitor stars is a crucial step to interpret observations of gravitational-wave events. In this …

The recent discovery of GW150914, the binary black hole merger detected by Advanced
LIGO, has the potential to revolutionize observational astrophysics. But to fully utilize this …

The mass spectrum of stellar mass black holes (BHs) is highly uncertain. Dynamical mass
measurements are available only for few (∼ 10) BHs in X-ray binaries, while theoretical …

The runaway collision scenario is one of the most promising mechanisms to explain the
formation of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) in young dense star clusters. On the …

This book discusses in detail all the relevant numerical methods for the classical N-body
problem. It demonstrates how to develop clear and elegant algorithms for models of …

We study the growth rate of stars via stellar collisions in dense star clusters, calibrating our
analytic calculations with direct N-body simulations of up to 65,536 stars, performed on the …

A luminous X-ray source is associated with MGG 11—a cluster of young stars∼ 200 pc from
the centre of the starburst galaxy M 82 (refs,). The properties of this source are best …