Dynamics of supermassive black holes in centers of galaxies

Supermassive black holes are believed to reside in the central regions of galaxies. Galactic mergers naturally lead to the production of the binary black hole systems, which serve as powerful sources of gravitational waves in the Universe. The goal of the project would be to explore the interaction of the supermassive black hole binaries with their stellar surroundings, and to tie our understanding of this interaction to other manifestations of activity in galactic nuclei. In particular, the parallels with the tidal disruptions of stars by single black holes will be explored and the observational consequences of the strong stellar scattering by the binary black holes will be studied.