Binaries in galactic nuclei and gravitational-wave sources
In Petrovich & Antonini 2017 we studied the orbital evolution of stellar binaries in our galactic center and proposed that a sizable fraction of the LIGO sources come from mergers of binary black holes in galactic nuclei through a combination of three-body interactions (the third-body being a central massive black hole) and the perturbations from the dense stellar cluster. First, some context. The stellar binaries in the inner parsec of our galactic center orbit around the ma
High-eccentricity migration of hot and warm Jupiters
I worked on my thesis trying to understand how the hundreds of Jupiter-like planets discovered in short-period orbits (<10 days, the so-called hot Jupiters) could have attained their extreme orbits. One formation channel that I studied is known as high-eccentricity migration. This channel postulates that Jovian planets are generally formed in wide orbits (like Jupiter), but after its birth gas disk dissipates a fraction (less than ~10%) of them can somehow reach extreme eccen