Loss Cone Dynamics

Understand

Supermassive black holes can capture or disrupt stars that come sufficiently close.

• This article reviews the dynamical processes by which stars or stellar remnants are placed onto loss-cone orbits and the implications for feeding rates.
• The capture rate is well defined for spherical galaxies with nuclear relaxation times that are shorter than the galaxy's age.
• However, even the dense nucleus of the Milky Way may be less than one relaxation time old, and this is certainly the case for more massive galaxies; the capture rate in such galaxies is an initial-value problem with poorly-known initial conditions and the rate can be much higher, or much lower, than the rate in a collisionally relaxed nucleus.