Massive Black Holes: Evidence, Demographics and Cosmic Evolution
Astrophysics of Galaxies
2014-11-03 v1
Abstract
The article summarizes the observational evidence for the existence of massive black holes, as well as the current knowledge about their abundance, their mass and spin distributions, and their cosmic evolution within and together with their galactic hosts. We finish with a discussion of how massive black holes may in the future serve as laboratories for testing the theory of gravitation in the extreme curvature regimes near the event horizon.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1410.8717,
title = {Massive Black Holes: Evidence, Demographics and Cosmic Evolution},
author = {Reinhard Genzel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.8717},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
Proceedings of the 26th Solvay Conference on Physics: "Astrophysics and Cosmology", R. Blandford and A. Sevrin, eds., World Scientific