Publications

A selection of our recent papers on stellar collisions and the objects they leave behind. For the complete, always-current record, jump to NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS).

All publications on NASA ADS

Recent work

A sampling of our papers from the last few years. Every figure comes from the paper it accompanies, and Allegheny undergraduates contributed to the simulations behind them.

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  Teaching a computer to predict stellar collisions

  We ran nearly 28,000 collision simulations and used them to train machine learning models that predict, in an instant, what a collision between any two stars will leave behind.

  ADS arXiv

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  Star crashes near the galaxy's central black hole

  Near a supermassive black hole, stars move so fast that they slam into each other head-on. We modeled what those impacts do to Sun-like stars in the heart of our own galaxy.

  ADS arXiv

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  A massive star meets a pair of black holes

  When a pair of black holes tears a massive star apart, each one can capture its own swirling disk of stellar gas. Those disks nudge the black holes' spins into alignment, a fingerprint that gravitational wave detectors can search for.

  ADS arXiv

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  Stripped stars from high-speed collisions

  In galactic centers, stars can collide at thousands of kilometers per second. These hit-and-run impacts tear off a star's outer layers and leave behind chemically unusual survivors. The movies below show these simulations in action.

  ADS arXiv

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  When planets collide

  Stars are not the only things that crash. We simulated collisions between sub-Neptune planets and found that most impacts strip away their thick atmospheres rather than merging the planets.

  ADS arXiv

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  A star nibbled by a black hole

  A star that swings too close to a mid-sized black hole can lose part of itself on each pass and survive to repeat the ordeal. We simulated these partial disruptions to predict the flares telescopes should see.

  ADS arXiv

More recent papers

• Kremer et al. 2023, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: the flares produced when a stellar-mass black hole shreds a star and winds reprocess the light (ADS, arXiv).
• Kremer et al. 2022, The Astrophysical Journal: a survey of collisions and close encounters between black holes and main-sequence stars (ADS, arXiv).
• Hatfull et al. 2021, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: building realistic 3D models of touching binary stars on their way to a merger (ADS, arXiv).