DAVID MERRITT, ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

PRINCETON ASTRONOMY COLLOQUIUM - MARCH 1, 2005

ABSTRACT

Dynamics of Galactic Nuclei: Beyond the Million-Body Problem

Galactic nuclei are the sites of a number of unique physical phenomena, due to their high densities and the presence of supermassive black holes. Among the novel observational signatures that might be detected from galactic nuclei in the near future are gravitational waves from coalescing black holes and WIMP annihilations from regions of high dark matter density. Predicting the rates of such events and interpreting the signals will require a better understanding of the dynamical interaction between black holes, stars, and dark matter. This has recently become feasible via direct simulation,
through a combination of special-purpose hardware, parallel computer architectures, and algorithms like chain regularization. A dedicated computational platform for studying galactic nuclei, the 32-node GRAPE cluster, has just been inaugurated at RIT which can carry out direct-summation N-body simulations with particle numbers as high as four million and at speeds of 4 Tflops. I will present some preliminary results and discuss directions for future research.