Related papers: Powerful flares from recoiling black holes in quas…
Relativistic outflows are a common phenomenon in accreting black holes. Despite the enormous differences in scale, stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries and collapsars, and super-massive black holes at the dynamic centre of galaxies…
We present near-infrared spectra of young radio quasars [P(1.4GHz) ~ 26-27 W/Hz] selected from the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer. The detected objects have typical redshifts of z ~ 1.6-2.5 and bolometric luminosities ~ 10^47 erg/s.…
A new scenario for the emission of high-energy gamma-rays from dark matter annihilation around massive black holes is presented. A black hole can leave its parent halo, by means of gravitational radiation recoil, in a merger event or in the…
Optically-thick envelopes may form following the tidal disruption of a star by a massive black hole. Such envelopes would reprocess hard radiation from accretion close to the black hole into the UV and optical bands producing AGN-luminosity…
The observations and theory of the exciting new class of galactic black hole X-ray transients is reviewed. Seven of these systems have measured mass functions or mass estimates in excess of stable neutron stars, making them excellent black…
The X-ray mission Chandra has observed a dramatic X-ray flare -- a brightening by a factor of 50 for only three hours -- from Sgr A*, the Galactic Center supermassive black hole. Sgr A* has never shown variability of this amplitude in the…
Current phenomenology suggests the presence of a compact baryon-poor energy source to cosmological gamma-ray bursts reacting to high-density matter. The association of short and long gamma-ray bursts with hyper- and suspended accretion onto…
We analyze three scenarios to address the challenge of ultrafast gamma-ray variability reported from active galactic nuclei. We focus on the energy requirements imposed by these scenarios: (i) external cloud in the jet, (ii) relativistic…
We studied the thermal stability of non-self-gravitating turbulent $\alpha$-discs around supermassive black holes (SMBHs) to test a new type of high-amplitude galactic nucleus flares. By calculating the disc structures, we computed the…
Black hole impacts on accretion disks in galactic nuclei can power luminous transients, but predicting their observable signatures is challenging because the post-collision flow is highly time-dependent and inhomogeneous. We present a…
We report the detection of a very short time scale flare in the radio-loud narrow line quasars PKS 0558-504 by using ASCA. The X-ray count rates increased and decreased by a factor of two in 33 minutes, and possibly by 40% in as short as…
Simulations of binary black hole mergers indicate that asymmetrical gravitational wave (GW) emission can cause black holes to recoil at speeds up to thousands of km/s. These GW recoil events can dramatically affect the coevolution of…
Recent calculations of gravitational radiation recoil generated during black-hole binary mergers have reopened the possibility that a merged binary can be ejected even from the nucleus of a massive host galaxy. Here we report the first…
We measure the recoil velocity as a function of spin for equal-mass, highly-spinning black-hole binaries, with spins in the orbital plane, equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. We confirm that the leading-order effect is linear in…
Energetic outflows appear to occur in conjunction with active mass accretion onto supermassive black holes. These outflows are most readily observed in the approximately 10% of quasars with broad absorption lines, where the observer's line…
Ultralight degrees of freedom coupled to matter lead to resonances, which can be excited when the Compton wavelength of the field equals a dynamical scale in the problem. For binaries composed of a star orbiting a supermassive black hole,…
It is now widely accepted that most galaxies undergo an active phase, during which a central super-massive black hole generates vast radiant luminosities through the gravitational accretion of gas. Winds launched from a rotating accretion…
There are now four low mass X-ray binaries with black holes which show twin resonant-like HFQPOs. Similar QPOs might have been found in Sgr A*. I review the power spectral density distributions of the three X-ray flares and the six NIR…
Quasars accreting matter at very high rates (known as extreme Population A [xA] or super-Eddington accreting massive black holes) provide a new class of distance indicators covering cosmic epochs from the present-day Universe up to less…
We present a model for the short timescale spectral variability of accreting black holes. It describes well the time-averaged spectra as well as temporal characteristics such as power-density spectrum, time/phase lags, and coherence…