Related papers: Small, dark, and heavy: But is it a black hole?
Inspired by the recent conjecture that black holes are condensates of gravitons, we investigate a simple model for the black hole degrees of freedom that is consistent both from the point of view of Quantum mechanics and of General…
Dark matter is an important ingredient of galaxies, as was recognised early on by Ken Freeman himself! Evidence for dark matter halos is still indirect, based on analysing motions of tracers such as gas and stars. In a sense the visible…
We conjecture that black holes, whether accreting matter or not, can also lose mass to phantom energy production. Such a process can be made plausible in theories that allow for non-local connections between short and long wavelength modes.…
Nerd abstract: Observational constraints on spacetime are reviewed, focusing on how the underlying physics (dark matter, dark energy, gravity) can be tested rather than assumed. Popular abstract: Space is not a boring static stage on which…
Dark matter has been introduced to explain many independent gravitational effects at different astronomical scales, in galaxies, groups of galaxies, clusters, superclusters and even across the full horizon. This review describes the…
Massless black holes can be understood as bound states of a (positive mass) extreme a=\sqrt{3} black hole and a singular object with opposite (i.e. negative) mass with vanishing ADM (total) mass but non-vanishing gravitational field.…
The existence of black holes and of spacetime singularities is a fundamental issue in science. Despite this, observations supporting their existence are scarce, and their interpretation unclear. We overview how strong a case for black holes…
While in general relativity black holes can be freely embedded into a cosmological background, the same problem in brane-worlds is much more cumbersome. We present here the results obtained so far in the explicit constructions of such…
Black holes are the simplest objects in the universe. They correspond to extreme deformations of spacetime geometry, and can exist even devoid of matter. In general relativity, (electro)vacuum black holes are uniquely determined by their…
In this article we address the mystery of dark matter. We expound the various evidences, astrophysical and cosmological, leading to hypothesize the existence of an invisible form of matter, whose attempts at detecting it have so far all…
It has been suggested that maximally spinning black holes can serve as particle accelerators, reaching arbitrarily high center-of-mass energies. Despite several objections regarding the practical achievability of such high energies, and…
Some aspects of black holes in supersymmetric theories of gravity are reviewed and some recent results outlined.
The horizon (the surface) of a black hole is a null surface, defined by those hypothetical "outgoing" light rays that just hover under the influence of the strong gravity at the surface. Because the light rays are orthogonal to the spatial…
Too light primordial black holes evaporate and are therefore strongly constrained by various bounds, e.g. Cosmic Microwave Background distortion. However, if they are formed strongly clustered, the corresponding haloes may collapse in…
The cosmological observations coupled with theoretical calculations suggest the existence of enormous amount of unseen and unknown matter or dark matter in the universe. The evidence of their existence, the possible candidates and their…
There are reasons (which we enumerate) to think that an infinite extra dimension will harbor a black hole. In this case, brane-localized modes of gravity and gauge fields become quasilocalized, and light from a distant object can become…
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…
Most black holes are known to be unstable to emitting Hawking radiation (in asymptotically flat spacetime). If the black holes are non-extreme, they have positive temperature and emit thermally. If they are extremal rotating black holes,…
Here we review the recent evidence for dark energy, dark matter and black holes as components of an expanding universe, for the vantage point of a non-expert; we speculate on a specific DM particle.
While the energy of the universe has been established to be about 0.04 baryons, 0.24 dark matter and 0.72 dark energy, the cosmological entropy is almost entirely, about $(1 - 10^{-15})$, from black holes and only $10^{-15}$ from everything…