Rotational Brownian motion (astronomy) supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. Perturbations from passing stars can alter the orbital plane of such a binary, which in turn alters the direction of the spin axis of the single black hole that forms when the two coalesce. Rotational Brownian motion is often observed in N-body simulations of galaxies containing binary black holes. The massive binary sinks to the center of the galaxy via dynamical friction where it interacts with passing stars. The same gravitational perturbations that induce a random walk in the orientation of the binary, also cause the binary to shrink, via the gravitational
Brownian excursion Groeneboom (1983) and Pitman (1983) give decompositions of Brownian motion formula_5 in terms of i.i.d Brownian excursions and the least concave majorant (or greatest convex minorant) of formula_5. For an introduction to Itô's general theory of Brownian excursions and the Itô Poisson process of excursions, see Revuz and Yor (1994), chapter XII. The Brownian excursion area arises in connection with the enumeration of connected graphs, many other problems in combinatorial theory; see e.g.,, and the limit distribution of the Betti numbers of certain varieties in cohomology theory. Takacs (1991a) shows that formula_19 has density where formula_21 are the zeros of