Related papers: Microquasars: summary and outlook
Probing gravity in its strongest regime is a central goal of modern physics, as the nature of the most compact objects reflects fundamental aspects of Einstein's theory of general relativity (GR). In GR, black holes are regarded as the most…
Since a black hole does not emit light from its interior, nor does it have a surface on which light from nearby sources can be reflected, observational study of black hole physics requires observing the gravitational impact of the black…
The extragalactic analogs of the microquasars, the quasars, are strong gamma-ray emitters at GeV energies. It is expected that microquasars are also gamma-ray sources, because of the analogy with quasars and because theoretical models…
Very compact objects probe extreme gravitational fields and may be the key to understand outstanding puzzles in fundamental physics. These include the nature of dark matter, the fate of spacetime singularities, or the loss of unitarity in…
Current stellar evolution models predict that during the core collapse of massive stars, a considerable amount of the stellar material will fall back onto the compact, collapsed remnants (neutron stars or black holes), usually in the form…
One of the possible explanations for dark matter is that of compact dark objects of baryonic origin, such as black holes or even planets. Accumulating evidence, including the discovery of merging stellar mass black holes through…
Collapsed objects have definitely been observed: some are stellar-mass objects, the endpoint of massive stars; others, millions of times more massive, have been discovered in the cores of most galaxies. Their formation poses some…
Several physical and astrophysical problems related to accretion onto black holes and neutron stars are shortly reviewed. I discuss the observed differences between these two types of compact objects in quiescent Soft X-ray Transients. Then…
Microlensing observations have now become a useful tool in searching for non--luminous astrophysical compact objects (brown dwarfs, faint stars, neutron stars, black holes and even planets). Originally conceived for establishing whether the…
Stellar-mass black holes ($3$ $M_\odot \lesssim M_{\rm BH} \lesssim 150$ $M_\odot$) are the natural product of the evolution of heavy stars ($M_{\rm star} \gtrsim 20$ $M_\odot$). In our Galaxy, we expect $10^8$-$10^9$ stellar-mass black…
Galactic microquasars are certainly one of the most recent additions to the field of high energy astrophysics and have attracted increasing interest over the last decade. However, the high energy part of the spectrum of microquasars is the…
Retrolensing is a gravitational lensing effect in which light emitted by a background source is deflected by a black hole and redirected toward the observer after undergoing nearly complete loops around the black hole. In this context, we…
One of the main goals of contemporary theoretical physics is to find the quantum theory of gravity. There are various working hypotheses, mostly operating in the regime of high-energy physics well above the reach of particle accelerators.…
Astrometry - the precise measurement of celestial positions and motions - is entering the micro-arcsecond ($\mu$as) era at multiple wavelengths, enabling new insights on compact objects across all mass scales. Here we review how…
A Buchdahl star is a highly compact star for which the boundary radius $R$ obeys $R=\frac98 r_+$, where $r_+$ is the gravitational radius of the star itself. A quasiblack hole is a maximum compact star, or more generically a maximum compact…
Accretion onto black holes is one of the most efficient energy source in the Universe. Black hole accretion powers some of the most luminous objects in the universe, including quasars, active galactic nuclei, tidal disruption events,…
It has been revealed using microlensing that a considerable part, possibly more than half, of the dark matter in the halo of our Galaxy consists of objects with a mass spectrum ranging from 0.05 to 0.8 of the solar mass. What is the nature…
Massive structures, such as galaxies, act as strong gravitational lenses on background sources. When the background source is a quasar, several lensed images are seen, as magnified or de-magnified versions of the same object. The detailed…
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) of long duration probably result from the core-collapse of massive stars in binary systems. After the collapse of the primary star the binary system may remain bound leaving a microquasar or ULX source as remnant. In…
Stars with an initial mass more than ~25 Msun are thought to ultimately become black holes. Then stellar-mass black holes should be ubiquitous but fewer than 20 have been found in our Galaxy to date, all of which have been found through…