Rotational Brownian motion (astronomy) of supermassive black holes appear to be randomly aligned with respect to their host galaxies. Rotational Brownian motion (astronomy) In astronomy, rotational Brownian motion is the random walk in orientation of a binary star's orbital plane, induced by gravitational perturbations from passing stars. Consider a binary that consists of two massive objects (stars, black holes etc.) and that is embedded in a stellar system containing a large number of stars. Let formula_1 and formula_2 be the masses of the two components of the binary whose total mass is formula_3. A field star that approaches the binary with impact parameter formula_4
Brownian meander Brownian meander In the mathematical theory of probability, Brownian meander formula_1 is a continuous non-homogeneous Markov process defined as follows: Let formula_2 be a standard one-dimensional Brownian motion, and formula_3, i.e. the last time before "t" = 1 when formula_4 visits formula_5. Then the Brownian meander is defined by the following: In words, let formula_7 be the last time before 1 that a standard Brownian motion visits formula_5. (formula_9 almost surely.) We snip off and discard the trajectory of Brownian motion before formula_7, and scale the remaining part so that it spans a time interval of length 1. The scaling