Related papers: Black hole mass measurements using ionized gas dis…
High-redshift ($z>2$) blazars, with relativistic jets aligned toward us, probe the most powerful end of the active galactic nuclei (AGN) population. We aim at determining the black hole masses and mass accretion rates of high-$z$ blazars in…
Mass and spin are the only two parameters needed to completely characterize black holes in General Relativity. However, the interaction between black holes and their environment is where complexity lies, as the relevant physical processes…
A dark matter overdensity around a black hole may significantly alter the dynamics of the black hole's merger with another compact object. We consider here intermediate mass-ratio inspirals of stellar-mass compact objects with…
We study the effects of a thin gaseous accretion disk on the inspiral of a stellar--mass black hole into a supermassive black hole. We construct a phenomenological angular momentum transport equation that reproduces known disk effects. Disk…
While galactic bulges may contain no significant dust of their own, the dust within galaxy discs can strongly attenuate the light from their embedded bulges. Furthermore, such dust inhibits the ability of observationally-determined…
For an accretion disk around a black hole, the strong relativistic effects affect every aspect of the radiation from the disk, including its spectrum, light-curve, and image. This work investigates in detail how the images of a thin disk…
The dust in protoplanetary disks is an important ingredient in planet formation and can be investigated with model simulations and quantitative imaging polarimetry of the scattered stellar light. This study explores circumstellar disks with…
We study the limits of the spatial and velocity resolution of radio interferometry to infer the mass of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galactic centres using the kinematics of circum-nuclear molecular gas, by considering the shapes of…
We use a large data-set of realistic synthetic observations (PaperI) to assess how observational techniques affect the measurement of physical properties of star-forming regions. In this paper (PaperII), we explore the reliability of the…
Simulations of black hole accretion have shown that magnetic stresses are present near and inside the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO). This finding suggests that such flows may be more luminous than predicted by the standard…
The light scattered from dust grains in debris disks is typically modeled as compact spheres using Lorenz-Mie theory or as porous spheres by incorporating an effective medium theory. In this work we examine the effect of incorporating a…
Mergers of stellar-mass black holes were recently observed in the gravitational wave window opened by LIGO. This puts the spotlight on dense stellar systems and their ability to create intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) through repeated…
We explore possible systematic errors in the mass measurements of stellar mass black holes. We find that significant errors can arise from the assumption of zero or constant emission from the accretion flow, which is commonly used when…
A new Monte-Carlo radiative-transfer code, Sunrise, is used in conjunction with hydrodynamic simulations of major galaxy mergers to calculate the effects of dust in such systems. The simulations are in good agreement with observations of…
Knowing the masses and sizes of protoplanetary disks is of fundamental importance for the contemporary theories of planet formation. However, their measurements are associated with large uncertainties. In this proof of concept study, we…
ALMA has revealed that the millimetre dust structures of protoplanetary discs are extremely diverse. It has been proposed that the strength of H$_2$O emission in the inner disc particularly depends on the influx of icy pebbles from the…
Ultra-Luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are accreting black holes for which their X-ray properties have been seen to be different to the case of stellar-mass black hole binaries. For most of the cases their intrinsic energy spectra are well…
Black hole (BH) masses that have been measured by reverberation mapping in active galaxies fall significantly below the correlation between bulge luminosity and BH mass determined from spatially resolved kinematics of nearby normal…
We study the effects of emission geometry on the capability to constrain black hole parameters from measurements of the shadow and inner-shadow of a Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole. We investigate the capability to constrain mass, charge,…
Recent gravitational wave observations include possible detections of black hole - neutron star binary mergers. As with binary black hole mergers, numerical simulations help characterize the sources. For binary systems with neutron star…