Related papers: Black Holes in Active Galactic Nuclei
During the motion of a binary pulsar around the Galactic center, the pulsar and its companion experience a wind of dark-matter particles that can affect the orbital motion through dynamical friction. We show that this effect produces a…
A search for recoiling supermassive black hole candidates recently yielded the best candidate thus far, SDSS J092712.65+294344.0 reported by Komossa et al. Here we propose the alternative hypothesis that this object is a supermassive black…
The evidence for supermassive Kerr black holes in galactic centers is strong and growing, but only the detection of gravitational waves will convincingly rule out other possibilities to explain the observations. The Kerr spacetime is…
During the final phases of inspiral, a massive black hole (MBH) binary experiences a recoil due to the asymmetric emission of gravitational waves. We use recent results from numerical relativity simulations together with models of the…
Because most large galaxies contain a central black hole, and galaxies often merge, black-hole binaries are expected to be common in galactic nuclei. Although they cannot be imaged, periodicities in the light curves of quasars have been…
The light curve of quasar OJ287 extends from 1891 up today without major gaps. This is partly due to extensive studies of historical plate archives by Rene Hudec and associates, and partly due to several observing campaigns in recent times.…
Recent observational results provide possible evidence that binary black holes (BBHs) exist in the center of giant galaxies and may merge to form a supermassive black hole in the process of their evolution. We first detected a periodic flux…
Black holes in binaries with other compact objects can provide natural venues for indirect detection of axions or other ultralight fields. The superradiant instability associated with a rapidly spinning black hole leads to the creation of…
Recently, a perturbative calculation to the first post-Newtonian order has shown that the analytically worked out Lense-Thirring precession of the orbital angular momentum of a test particle following a circular path around a massive…
High-frequency twin peak quasiperiodic oscillations (QPOs) are observed in four microquasars, i.e., Galactic black hole binary systems, with frequency ratio very close to 3:2. In the microquasar GRS 1915+105, the structure of QPOs exhibits…
Mass distribution of black holes identified through X-ray emission suggests a paucity of black holes in the mass range of 3 to 5 solar masses. Modified theories have been devised to explain this mass gap, and it is suggested that natal…
We have studied short-term variations of the blazar OJ 287, suspected to host a supermassive black hole binary. In this study, we use a two-season optical R-band dataset from 2004--2006 which consists of 3991 data points from the OJ 287…
We revisit various sets of published results from X-ray and optical studies of the Galactic black hole (BH) candidate MAXI J0637-430, which went into outburst in 2019. Combining the previously reported values of peak outburst luminosity,…
New long-term Very Long Baseline Array observations of the well-known jet in the M87 radio galaxy at 43 GHz show that the jet experiences a sideways shift with an approximately 8-10 yr quasi-periodicity. Such jet wobbling can be indicative…
We use direct-summation N-body integrations to follow the evolution of binary black holes at the centers of galaxy models with large, constant-density cores. Particle numbers as large as 400K are considered. The results are compared with…
Studying a centi-parsec supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) would allow us to explore a new parameter space in active galactic nuclei, and these objects are also potential sources of gravitational waves. We report evidence that an SMBHB…
This article reviews the current status of black hole astrophysics, focusing on topics of interest to a physics audience. Astronomers have discovered dozens of compact objects with masses greater than 3 solar masses, the likely maximum mass…
Supermassive black hole binaries may exist in the centers of active galactic nuclei like quasars and radio galaxies and mergers between galaxies may result in the formation of supermassive binaries during the course of galactic evolution.…
Within the framework of 2PN black-hole binary spin precession, we explore configurations where one of the two spins oscillates from being completely aligned with the orbital angular momentum to being completely anti-aligned with it during a…
A star with main sequence mass greater than $25\sim 30\msun$ may collapse to a black hole of about 10 $\msun$ at the final stage of the evolution. About an order of 1\% of stellar mass is likely to be in form of such black holes in…