Narrow Results

The discovery of dynamical friction was Chandrasekhar’s best known contribution to the theory of stellar dynamics, but his work ranged from the fewbody problem to the limit of large N (in effect, galaxies). Much of this work was summarised in the text “Principles of Stellar Dynamics“ (Chandrasekhar 1942, 1960), which ranges from a precise calculation of the time of relaxation, through a long analysis of galaxy models, to the behaviour of star clusters in tidal fields. The later edition also includes the work on dynamical friction and related issues. In this review we focus on progress in the collisional aspects of these problems, i.e. those where few-body interactions play a dominant role, and so we omit further discussion of galaxy dynamics. But we try to link Chandrasekhar’s fundamental discoveries in collisional problems with the progress that has been made in the 50 years since the publication of the enlarged edition.

Several observational evidences and deeper theoretical insights reveal that accretion and outflow/jet are strongly correlated. We model an advective disk-outflow coupled dynamics. We investigate the properties of the disk-outflow surface and how is it dependent on the spin of the black hole. The energetics of such a symbiotic system strongly depend on the mass, accretion rate and spin of the black holes. The model clearly shows that the outflow power extracted from the disk increases strongly with the spin of the black hole.

LOFT, the large observatory for X-ray timing, was selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) in February 2011 as one of four medium size mission concepts for the Cosmic Vision program that will compete for a launch opportunity in the early 2020s. LOFT will carry out high-time resolution (10 μs) and spectroscopic observations (<260 eV) of compact objects in the X-ray band (2-80 keV), with unprecedented throughput, thanks to its 10 m² effective area. LOFT will address the fundamental questions of the Cosmic Vision Theme “Matter under extreme conditions”: What is the fundamental equation of state of a compact object? Does matter orbiting close to the event horizon follow the predictions of general relativity?

There are two new observational facts: the mass spectrum of neutron stars and black hole candidates (or collapsars) shows an evident absence of compact objects with masses within the interval from 2 M⊙ (with a peak for neutron stars about 1.4 M⊙) to about 6 M⊙, and in close binary stellar systems with a low-massive (about 0.6 M⊙) optical companion the most probable mass value (the peak in the masses distribution of black hole candidates) is close to 7 M⊙. The problem of the compact objects discrete mass spectra demands some solution both in the context of the supernovae and gamma-ray bursts relation, and in connection with the core-collapse supernovae explosion mechanism itself. In the totally non-metric scalar-tensor model of gravitational interaction (in a modified or extended Feynman field approach to gravitation) the total mass of a compact relativistic object with extremely strong gravitational field (an analog of black holes in General Relativity) is approximately equal to 6.7 M⊙ with radius of a region filled with a matter (quark-gluon plasma) ≈ 10 km. Polarized emission of long gamma-ray bursts, a black-body component in their spectrum and other observed properties could be explained by the direct manifestation of a surface of these collapsars.