Related papers: Black Hole Formation and Growth: Simulations in Ge…
The existence of supermassive black holes lurking in the centers of galaxies and of stellar binary systems containing a black hole with a few solar masses has been established beyond reasonable doubt. The idea that black holes of…
Almost every galaxy in the local Universe is observed to have a massive black hole in the centre. The properties of these black holes are observed to tightly correlate with those of their host galaxy which has been interpreted as…
Binary supermassive black holes are produced by galactic mergers as the black holes from the two galaxies fall to the center of the merged system and form a bound pair. The two black holes will eventually coalesce in an enormous burst of…
Observations of distant bright quasars suggest that billion solar mass supermassive black holes (SMBHs) were already in place less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Models in which light black hole seeds form by the collapse of…
A small group of X-ray binaries currently provides the best evidence for the existence of stellar-mass black holes. These objects are interacting binary systems where the X-rays arise from accretion of material onto a compact object (i.e.…
The subject of this work is the formation of black holes in pure general relativity, by the focusing of incoming gravitational waves. The theorems established in this monograph constitute the first foray into the long time dynamics of…
The existence of massive black holes was postulated in the sixties, when the first quasars were discovered. In the late nineties their reality was proven beyond doubt, in the Milky way and a handful nearby galaxies. Since then, enormous…
Ultra-high energy cosmic rays create black holes in scenarios with extra dimensions and TeV-scale gravity. In particular, cosmic neutrinos will produce black holes deep in the atmosphere, initiating quasi-horizontal showers far above the…
The origin of supermassive black holes in the galactic nuclei is quite uncertain in spite of extensive set of observational data. We review the known scenarios of galactic and cosmological formation of supermassive black holes. The common…
Classical black holes are solutions of the field equations of General Relativity. Many astronomical observations suggest that black holes really exist in nature. However, an unambiguous proof for their existence is still lacking. Neither…
In this paper we explore the idea that black holes can persist in a universe that collapses to a big crunch and then bounces into a new phase of expansion. We use a scalar field to model the matter content of such a universe {near the time}…
Black holes are perhaps the most strange and fascinating objects known to exist in the universe. Our understanding of space and time is pushed to its limits by the extreme conditions found in these objects. They can be used as natural…
The recent observation of gravitational waves confirms one of the most interesting predictions in general relativity: the black holes. Because the gravitational waves detected by LIGO fit very well within general relativity as a phenomenon…
In the last decade, a combination of high sensitivity, high spatial resolution observations and of coordinated multi-wavelength surveys has revolutionized our view of extra-galactic black hole (BH) astrophysics. We now know that…
The formation and evolution of binary black holes (BH) is studied using the modern evolutionary scenario for very massive stars with high mass loss (Vanbeveren et al. 1998). Main sequence stars with masses $M>35 M_\odot$ are assumed to form…
Improved observations of globular clusters are uncovering a large number of radio pulsars and of X-ray sources. The latter include binaries in which a neutron star or a white dwarf accretes matter from a companion, recycled pulsars, and…
Most galaxies have central massive black holes (BH), and merge with others during their evolution, as strongly suggested by recent observations. Consequently a black hole binary (BHB) emerges. Considering the evolution of the binary when it…
We evolve for the first time in full general relativity a small, collisional N-body black hole cluster of arbitrary total mass M. The bound cluster is initially compact (radius R/M~10), stable, and consists of 25 equal-mass, nonspinning…
Massive black holes are ubiquitous, occurring at the centres of all massive galaxies and possibly many low mass ones. They are no ornament which just happens to be there, but play a role vital to the growth and structure of the host galaxy.…
Black holes with masses $\approx 1\, M_{\odot}$ cannot be produced via stellar evolution. A popular scenario of their formation involves transmutation of neutron stars - by accumulation of dark matter triggering gravitational collapse in…