| Description: | The massive black holes found at the centers of most galaxies, including our own, are believed to be the ashes of the fuel that powered quasars early in the history of the universe. I will briefly review the observational evidence for these objects and then describe some of the exotic dynamical phenomena that originate in their vicinity, including hypervelocity stars, resonant relaxation, phase transitions, and warped and lopsided stellar disks.
Animation above: This animation shows the process of resonant relaxation. Each symbol represents the axis of a star's orbit around the central black hole in our Galaxy. The gravitational torques between the stellar orbits cause the axes to wander. The yellow symbols are orbits whose axes were initially in the northern hemisphere of the plot, and the red symbols correspond to orbits that were initially in the southern hemisphere. By the end of the animation, corresponding to a few million years in real time, the yellow and red symbols are mixed together.
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