Michael Kesden

Tidal disruption rate of stars by spinning supermassive black holes

A supermassive black hole can disrupt a star when its tidal field exceeds the stars self-gravity, and can directly capture stars that cross its event horizon. For black holes with mass

Resonant-plane locking and spin alignment in stellar-mass black-hole binaries: A diagnostic of compact-binary formation

Mensuremath{gtrsim}{10}^{7}{M}_{ensuremath{bigodot}}

Multi-timescale analysis of phase transitions in precessing black-hole binaries

, tidal disruption of main-sequence stars occurs close enough to the event horizon that a Newtonian treatment of the tidal field is no longer valid. The fraction of stars that are directly captured is also no longer negligible. We calculate generically oriented stellar orbits in the Kerr metric, and evaluate the relativistic tidal tensor at the pericenter for those stars not directly captured by the black hole. We combine this relativistic analysis with previous calculations of how these orbits are populated to determine tidal-disruption rates for spinning black holes. We find, consistent with previous results, that black-hole spin increases the upper limit on the mass of a black hole capable of tidally disrupting solarlike stars to

Black-Hole Spin Dependence in the Light Curves of Tidal Disruption Events

ensuremath{sim}7ifmmodetimeselsetexttimesfi{}{10}^{8}{M}_{ensuremath{bigodot}}

Spin expansion for binary black hole mergers: New predictions and future directions

. More quantitatively, we find that direct stellar capture reduces tidal-disruption rates by a factor

Effective Potentials and Morphological Transitions for Binary Black Hole Spin Precession

ensuremath{sim}2/3text{ }(1/10)

Distinguishing black-hole spin-orbit resonances by their gravitational-wave signatures

at

Transient solar oscillations driven by primordial black holes.

Mensuremath{simeq}{10}^{7}text{ }({10}^{8}){M}_{ensuremath{bigodot}}

Precessional instability in binary black holes with aligned spins

. The strong dependence of tidal-disruption rates on black-hole spin for

Effects of post-Newtonian spin alignment on the distribution of black-hole recoils

Mensuremath{gtrsim}{10}^{8}{M}_{ensuremath{bigodot}}