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 Brownian excursion In probability theory a Brownian excursion process is a stochastic process that is closely related to a Wiener process (or Brownian motion). Realisations of Brownian excursion processes are essentially just realizations of a Wiener process selected to satisfy certain conditions. In particular, a Brownian excursion process is a Wiener process conditioned to be positive and to take the value 0 at time 1. Alternatively, it is a Brownian bridge process conditioned to be positive. BEPs are important because, among other reasons, they naturally arise as the limit process of a number of conditional functional central limit theorems. A