Resonant friction on discs in galactic nuclei by Yuri Levin. on Thursday 24 November

We argue that resonant friction has a dramatic effect on a disc whose

rotation direction is misaligned with that of its host nuclear star cluster.

The disc's gravity causes gravitational perturbation of the cluster that in

turn exerts a strong torque back onto the disc. We argue that this torque may

be responsible for the observed disruption of the clockwise disc of young stars

in the Galactic Center, and show in numerical experiments that it produces the

observed features in the distribution of the stars' angular momenta. More

generally, we speculate that the rotation of nuclear star clusters has a

stabilizing effect on the orientation of transient massive accretion discs

around the supermassive black holes residing in their centers, and thus on the

directions and magnitudes of the black-hole spins.

arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12754v1