Related papers: Black Holes in the Galaxy
Binary black holes occupy a special place in our quest for understanding the evolution of galaxies along cosmic history. If massive black holes grow at the center of (pre-)galactic structures that experience a sequence of merger episodes,…
An extraordinary recent development in astrophysics was the discovery of the fossil relationship between central black hole mass and the stellar mass of galactic bulges. The physical process underpinning this relationship has become known…
Modern astrophysical methods of determination of spins of rotating stellar-mass black hole in close binaries and of supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei are briefly discussed. Effective spins of coalescing binary black holes…
Supermassive black holes are nowadays believed to reside in most local galaxies. Observations have revealed us vast information on the population of local and distant black holes, but the detailed physical properties of these dark massive…
We present a broad review on black holes. We analyse some of the fundamental concepts in black hole theory, the observational and theoretical status of stellar and galactic black holes, and their appearance as quantum objects.
Supernova theory suggests that black holes of a stellar origin cannot attain masses in the range of 50-135 solar masses in isolation. We argue here that this mass gap is filled in by black holes that grow by gas accretion in dense stellar…
This set of lectures is an introduction to black-hole astrophysics. The emphasis is made on the phenomenology of X-ray binaries and of supermassive compact objects at galactic centers.
Thanks to extensive observations with X-ray missions and facilities working in other wavelengths, as well as rapidly--advancing numerical simulations of accretion flows, our knowledge of astrophysical black holes has been remarkably…
Galaxies with Milky Way-like stellar masses have a wide range of bulge and black hole masses; in turn, these correlate with other properties such as star formation history. While many processes may drive bulge formation, major and minor…
Are the stellar-mass merging binary black holes, recently detected by their gravitational wave signal, of stellar or primordial origin? Answering this question will have profound implications for our understanding of the Universe, including…
After correcting spherical aberration in the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, the central masses of galaxies can be measured with a resolution 5 to 10 times better than can be achieved at the best terrestrial sites. This improvement in…
We calculate the formation rates of low-mass X-ray binaries with a black hole. Both a semi-analytic and a more detailed model predict formation rates two orders of magnitude lower than derived from the observations. Solution of this…
The spin of a black hole retains the memory of how the black hole grew, and can be a potent source of energy for powering relativistic jets. To understand the diagnostic power and astrophysical significance of black hole spin, however, we…
We investigate the effects of black hole mergers in star clusters on the black hole mass function. As black holes are not produced in pair-instability supernovae, it is suggested that there is a dearth of high mass stellar black holes. This…
The supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy can be weighed, in rare but realistic cases, when the galaxy acts as a strong gravitational lens. The central image that should be produced by the lens is either destroyed or…
A rather clear problem has remained in black hole physics: localizing black holes. One of the recent theoretical ways proposed to identify black hole mergers' hosts is through multi-messenger gravitational lensing: matching the properties…
We have embarked in an HST program to determine the masses of black holes in spiral galaxies directly by measuring the line emission arising from an extended accretion disk. For each of the galaxies in our sample we have measured the…
The recent observations of gravitational waves (GWs) by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration (LVK) have provided a new opportunity for studying our Universe. By detecting several merging events of black holes (BHs), LVK has spurred the…
Supermassive black holes are nowadays believed to reside in most local galaxies. Accretion of gas and black hole mergers play a fundamental role in determining the two parameters defining a black hole: mass and spin. I briefly review here…
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…