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Session 100 - Accretion Disks and Black Holes.
Display session, Thursday, January 16
Metropolitan Ballroom,
It has recently been shown (Rauch amp; Tremaine 1996) that for star clusters whose mean potential possesses certain symmetries, the rate of angular momentum relaxation can be greatly increased over that produced by the usual two-body process, an effect they termed resonant relaxation due to its dependence on orbits in the mean potential containing particular resonant features. One especially important system in which resonant relaxation will occur is that of a nuclear star cluster containing a massive black hole---which might be the typical case, according to current evidence---in which case the mean potential (near the black hole) is nearly Keplerian. This paper investigates the importance of resonant tidal disruption in such nuclei by using numerical simulations to estimate the increase in the total disruption rate and the associated change in the equilibrium distribution function of such clusters compared to their non-resonant counterparts. An estimate of the limiting black hole mass above which resonant tidal disruption is cut off by relativistic precession is made. Chaotic behavior discovered in the Wisdom-Holman symplectic mappings used to integrate the simulated clusters is also briefly reported on.
