THE CLOSE STELLAR COMPANIONS TO INTERMEDIATE-MASS BLACK HOLES

Grants

Funding Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Sverre Aarseth for many guiding conversations and advice on the inclusion of IMBHs and new diagnostics in star cluster simulations with NBODY6; we are lucky to have this fantastic code resource at our disposal. We thank the participants of the Stellar N-body Dynamics conference in Sexten, Italy, for helpful questions and discussion. We are grateful to Melvyn Davies, Shawfeng Dong, Jacqueline Goldstein, James Guillochon, Phillip Macias, Michela Mapelli, Cole Miller, Jill Naiman, Martin Rees, Johan Samsing, Mario Spera, Rainer Spurzem, Luca Zampieri, and Brunetto Ziosi for advice and helpful conversations. We thank the anonymous referee for constructive and useful feedback. This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013). The simulations for this research were carried out on the UCSC supercomputer Hyades, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (award number AST-1229745) and UCSC. M.M. is grateful for the support of the Chancellor's Fellowship at UCSC. E.R.-R. acknowledges financial support from the Packard Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and NASA ATP grant NNX14AH37G.