When
Where
NASA Einstein & TAC Postdoctoral Fellow
University of California at Berkeley
The Importance of being Eccentric
Disks composed of eccentric orbits undergo rich gravitational dynamics and experience new instabilities not available to their circular counterparts. I will review this emerging field of gravitational dynamics and will discuss implications ranging from the solar system to stars orbiting supermassive black holes. In particular, I will show how eccentric-disk dynamics may naturally reproduce the signatures in the outer solar system which have been attributed to a hypothetical “planet 9”. I will also show how eccentric-disk dynamics stabilizes the lopsided nuclei sometimes found in massive galaxies; this effect may also dramatically enhance the rate of tidal disruption events, possibly explaining their observed preference for E+A galaxies.