Related papers: The Current Status of Binary Black Hole Simulation…
Construction of astrophysically realistic initial data remains a central problem when modelling the merger and eventual coalescence of binary black holes in numerical relativity. The objective of this paper is to provide astrophysically…
The article summarizes the observational evidence for the existence of massive black holes, as well as the current knowledge about their abundance, their mass and spin distributions, and their cosmic evolution within and together with their…
We review the properties and behavior X-ray binaries that contain an accreting black hole. The larger majority of such systems are X-ray transients, and many of them were observed in daily pointings with RXTE throughout the course of their…
After a long wait, gravitational wave astronomy has finally begun. Binary black hole mergers are being detected by LIGO and Virgo, and theorists are starting to receive a wealth of data to be analized. At this point we can at long last…
While the early literature on black holes focused on event horizons, subsequently it was realized that their teleological nature makes them unsuitable for many physical applications both in classical and quantum gravity. Therefore, over the…
We present techniques for long-term, stable, and accurate evolutions of multiple-black-hole spacetimes using the `moving puncture' approach with fourth- and eighth-order finite difference stencils. We use these techniques to explore…
Gravitational waves from the coalescence of two black holes carry the signature of the strong field dynamics of binary black holes. In this work we have used numerical relativity simulations and post-Newtonian theory to investigate this…
Our understanding of space and time is probed to its depths by black holes. These objects, which appear as a natural consequence of general relativity, provide a powerful analytical tool able to examine macroscopic and microscopic…
Over the last decades X-ray spectroscopy has proven to be a powerful tool for the estimation of black hole spin and several other key parameters in dozens of AGN and black hole X-ray binaries. In this White Paper, we discuss the…
Stellar mass black holes are formed in the field, and are observed in binaries. Population synthesis estimates for the formation of BH-PSR binaries suggest these may be observed, but with very large formal uncertainties in the formation…
The nonlinear behavior of higher dimensional black hole spacetimes is of interest in several contexts, ranging from an understanding of cosmic censorship to black hole production in high-energy collisions. However, nonlinear numerical…
Accretion of dark energy onto black holes will take place when dark energy is not a cosmological constant. It has been proposed that the time evolution of the mass of the black holes in binary systems due to dark energy accretion could be…
Recent progress in numerical relativity now allows computation of the binary black hole merger, whereas post-Newtonian and perturbative techniques can be used to model the inspiral and ringdown phases. So far, most gravitational-wave…
Massive black hole binaries are naturally predicted in the context of the hierarchical model of structure formation. The binaries that manage to lose most of their angular momentum can coalesce to form a single remnant. In the last stages…
Black hole spacetimes that exhibit integrable singularities have gained considerable interest as alternatives to both regular and singular black holes. Unlike most known regular black hole solutions, these models evade the formation of an…
I overview the current understanding of the evolution of massive black hole (MBH) binaries in the center of the host stellar system. One of the main questions is whether the stellar dynamical effect can make the MBH binary hard enough that…
Modelling the end point of binary black hole mergers is a cornerstone of modern gravitational-wave astronomy. Extracting multiple quasinormal mode frequencies from the ringdown signal allows the remnant black hole to be studied in…
The properties of precessing, coalescing binary black holes are presently inferred through comparison with two approximate models of compact binary coalescence. In this work we show these two models often disagree substantially when…
We extend a recently developed numerical code to obtain stationary, axisymmetric solutions that describe rotating black hole spacetimes in a wide class of modified theories of gravity. The code utilizes a relaxed Newton-Raphson method to…
In this work we study the dynamics of spinning binary black hole systems in the strong field regime. For this purpose we extract from numerical relativity simulations the binding energy, specific orbital angular momentum, and…