Aleksey Generozov
Hello! You have reached the website of Aleksey Generozov. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, working with Stella Offner.
Recent Projects
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The Hills mechanism and the Galactic Center S-stars
The Galactic center contains ~10 million year old stars only 10 mpc from its central supermassive black hole (The S-stars). This observation is puzzling, considering that tidal forces in this region would suppress star formation. In Generozov&Madigan 2020, we describe how the S-stars can originate from disruptions of binaries from a larger disk structure. With the right initial configuration the disk undergoes a secular instability, that pushes binaries to highly eccentric orbits where they can be disrupted as shown in the above movie. In subsequent work, we made predictions for hypervelocity stars (Generozov 2020) and showed the disk may be formed from tidal disruption of a molecular cloud (Generozov et al 2022).
Explaining the mass and eccentricity distribution of the S-star population via this model is challenging. Instead the S-stars may come from continuously disrupting binaries originating tens to hundreds parsecs away from the Galactic Center (Generozov et al 2025).
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Triple formation scenarios for black hole-main sequence binaries
Recently the Gaia mission has discovered a few non-interacting black-hole stellar binaries. The orbital periods of the observed systems (~100-1000) days are difficult to explain with isolated binary evolution, potentially requiring unusual common envelope parameters. In Generozov&Perets2024, we showed some of these systems are more easily explained via evolution in hierarchical triples like the one above.
Tools/Software
- zams_tidal_coupling : Tabulated tidal coupling constants for ZAMS stars of different masses, computed using the Press and Teukolsky 1977 formalism.