Dieran Wang | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Hierarchical Black Hole Mergers in Nuclear Star Clusters: A Combined Dynamical-Secular Channel for GW231123-like Events

The recent binary black hole (BH) merger GW231123, with both components likely in the high-mass gap and with high spins, challenges standard BH binary formation models. It is usually thought that the BHs are of second (or higher) generation (2G), resulting from the mergers of smaller BHs. But the physical processes that produce the merging 2G BH binaries are unclear and highly unconstrained. We show that such 2G mergers can be naturally produced in the nuclear star cluster of Milky Way-like galaxy. The dominant channel combines a sequence of binary-single interactions with secular evolution driven by the central supermassive BH. Our model produces a merger rate consistent with GW231123 and further predicts an abundant population of 2G BH-star (or low-mass BH) binaries; these binaries may observationally manifest as micro tidal disruption events or low-frequency gravitational-wave (GW) sources. Detecting these binaries would provide crucial insights into the dynamical pathways of hierarchical BH assembly.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2025

Spin and Obliquity Distributions of Low-mass Planets Shaped by Dynamical Instability

Exoplanetary systems hosting multiple low-mass planets are thought to have experienced dynamical instability, during which planet-planet collisions and mergers occur; these collisions can impart substantial amount of angular momentum to the merger remnants, changing the obliquities of the resulting planets significantly. In this work, we carry out a series of $N$-body experiments to investigate the spin magnitude $(|\vec{S}|)$ and obliquity $(θ_{\rm SL})$ distributions of low-mass exoplanets that have gone through planetary collisions. In our fiducial super-Earth (with $m=3M_{\oplus}$, $R=1.3R_{\oplus}$) and mini-Neptune systems (with $m=9M_{\oplus}$, $R=2.5R_{\oplus}$), the collision products follow a nearly uniform distribution in $\cos{θ_{\rm SL}}$ and the spin-magnitude distribution is approximately linear in $|\vec{S}|$. Parameter studies and theoretical analysis show that increasing planetary radii or masses, or decreasing the initial planet-planet mutual inclinations, tend to polarize the obliquity distribution toward alignment or anti-alignment (i.e., excess probability near $\cos{θ_{\rm SL}}=\pm1$). Experiments with initially two-planet and three-planet systems produce qualitatively similar outcomes, suggesting that the trends in this study may generalize to systems with higher planetary multiplicities.

astro-ph.EP↗