Talk Title: Interaction of Supermassive black holes with their stellar and dark matter environments
Abstract: Massive black holes dominate the gravitational potential in their vicinity, and this fact suggests that they should induce observable changes in the distribution of luminous and dark matter at the centers of galaxies. I will review the mechanisms by which this takes place, including collisionless and collisional cusp formation, interaction of binary black holes with their surroundings, Brownian motion, and gravitational radiation recoil. There is reasonable agreement between these models and the observed structure of galactic nuclei, although a number of uncertainties remain, most importantly the unknown efficiency of binary black hole coalescence.
Link to talk: N/A