Related papers: Testing the Kerr black hole hypothesis
Black holes are one of the most fascinating predictions of general relativity. They are the natural product of the complete gravitational collapse of matter and today we have a body of observational evidence supporting the existence of…
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…
In the past decade, we have seen an unprecedented progress in our ability of testing general relativity in the strong field regime with black hole observations. Most studies have focused on the so-called tests of the Kerr hypothesis: they…
It is well known that celestial bodies tend to be spherical due to gravity and that rotation produces deviations from this sphericity. We discuss what is known and expected about the shape of black holes' horizons from their formation to…
Very compact objects probe extreme gravitational fields and may be the key to understand outstanding puzzles in fundamental physics. These include the nature of dark matter, the fate of spacetime singularities, or the loss of unitarity in…
Considerable attention has recently focused on gravity theories obtained by extending general relativity with additional scalar, vector, or tensor degrees of freedom. In this paper, we show that the black-hole solutions of these theories…
The possible existence of black holes has fascinated scientists at least since Michell and Laplace's proposal that a gravitating object could exist from which light could not escape. In the 20th century, in light of the general theory of…
Astrophysical tests of general relativity belong to two categories: 1) "internal", i.e. consistency tests within the theory (for example, tests that astrophysical black holes are indeed described by the Kerr solution and its perturbations),…
Any observer outside black holes cannot detect any physical signal produced by the black holes themselves, since, by definition, the black holes are not located in the causal past of the outside observer. In fact, what we regard as black…
We review here some of the major open issues and challenges in black hole physics today, and the current progress on the same. It is pointed out that to secure a concrete foundation for the basic theory as well as astrophysical applications…
One of the Holy Grails of observational astronomy is to confirm the prediction that black holes in the Universe are described by the Kerr solution of Einstein's field equations of general relativity. This Topical Collection provides a…
We describe the possible forms of black hole images, viewed by a distant observer. These images are numerically calculated basing on general relativity and equations of motion in the Kerr-Newman metric. Black hole image is a gravitationally…
Gravitational lensing is a well known phenomenon predicted by the General Theory of Relativity. It is now a well-developed observational technique in astronomy and is considered to be a fundamental tool for acquiring information about the…
According to the Cosmic Censorship Conjecture, all the singularities produced by the collapsing matter must be hidden behind an event horizon. In 4D general relativity, this implies that the final product of the collapse is a Kerr-Newman…
Everybody knows what the classical black holes are. In short, this is a spacetime region beyond the so-called event horizon. The notion of the event horizon is mathematically well defined. The situation with a definition of quantum black…
The computation of gravitational radiation generated by the coalescence of inspiralling binary black holes is nowdays one of the main goals of numerical relativity. Perturbation theory has emerged as an ubiquitous tool for all those…
Black holes were predicted by Einstein General Relativity (GR). Because of unusual properties of these objects their existence is almost unbelievable. There are gravitation theories which do not predict the black hole appearance. By now,…
The specific angular momentum of a Kerr black hole must not be larger than its mass. The observational confirmation of this bound which we call a Kerr bound directly suggests the existence of a black hole. In order to investigate…
The existence of supermassive collapsed objects in the cores of most galaxies poses still-unanswered questions. First, how did they form, and how does their mass depend on the properties of the host galaxy? Second, can observations probe…
We uncover two mechanisms that can render Kerr black holes unstable in scalar-tensor gravity, both associated to the presence of matter in the vicinity of the black hole and the fact that this introduces an effective mass for the scalar.…