Dynamics and evolution of galactic nuclei

This is a book on a modern and flourishing aspect of stellar dynamics, the dynamics of galactic nuclei, especially those containing massive black holes. A remarkable feature of this text is that it would be equally useful and interesting to researchers working in this and related fields as it provides an up-to-date critical and systematic review of the subject (with references to papers published up to September 2012), as well as to those working on problems only loosely connected with the stellar dynamics of galactic nuclei as it contains useful and brief summaries of the most important concepts and results. The book will also be most useful to graduate and senior undergraduate students as the text is exceptionally clear and the calculations are presented with a detail sufficient to allow the reader to reproduce them without much agony. In other words, this is a book that would be useful to anybody interested in the astrophysics of galaxies. The focus of the book is the stellar dynamics near supermassive black holes. Gas dynamics in galactic nuclei is only discussed briefly and only where it is essential for the stellar dynamics. This is not a shortcoming as the two topics can hardly be presented under one cover to the detail and clarity achieved in this book. Books and papers suggested in an annotated reference list as further reading will help to complete the picture and to find details omitted in the book. Overall, the book offers a detailed and balanced, physical and mathematical discussion of the standard approaches, their motivation and limitations, examples of where they do not work and what to do then. The text presents valuable discussions of the pitfalls, ambiguities and degeneracies of the observational data and theoretical models. The goal of the author is not just to present facts and results but, much more than that, to explain why this or another idea can or should be used, and to motivate mathematical manipulations before they start. In many cases, the author discusses in detail a variety of approximations that can be used to address a given problem and, crucially, he presents both reasonable and plausible but unreasonable ideas, and explains why the latter fail. This rare feature of the book enhances its value for any reader, either a student or a mature researcher. Calculations are presented with about the right amount of detail, neither too little, so that they can be reproduced by the reader, nor too much, so that boredom is avoided. The explanations are very careful, providing all details, definitions and assumptions. A review of the physical and mathematical foundations of the ideas and methods discussed is brief and yet informative and deep as it goes beyond a simple statement of facts to provide qualitative explanations appealing to intuition. The text contains unpublished results that help to make the discussion thorough and comprehensive. The book is written with clear pedagogical experience as discussions start with the simplest cases, and the complexity builds up gradually. Wherever appropriate, calculations are completed with order-of-magnitude estimates and the results are presented normalized to typical values of parameters.