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 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