Related papers: Black-Hole Bombs and Photon-Mass Bounds
We investigate the global properties of the radiation emitted by the accretion disk around Kerr black holes. Using the Kerr blackbody (KERRBB) numerical model, we build an analytic approximation of the disk emission features focusing on the…
The images of supermassive black holes surrounded by optically-thin, radiatively-inefficient accretion flows, like those observed with the Event Horizon Telescope, are characterized by a bright ring of emission surrounding the black-hole…
Gravitational wave observations have recently revealed with high significance, and high precision, the existence of $\mathcal{O}(100) \, M_\odot$ rapidly rotating black holes, allowing gravitational wave events to be used for the first time…
We are motivated by the recently reported dynamical evidence of stars with short orbital periods moving around the center of the Milky Way and the corresponding hypothesis about the existence of a supermassive black hole hosted at its…
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 peaks of the spectra of the accretion disks surrounding massive black holes in quasars are in the far-UV or soft X-ray band, which are usually not observed. However, in the disk corona model, the soft photons from the disk are…
High-frequency quasiperiodic oscillations of the X-ray flux comming from black-hole binaries have the potential to provide precise estimates of the mass and the spin of the central black hole, if an adequate model for them was available.…
The superradiant instability modes of ultralight massive vector bosons are studied for weakly charged rotating black holes in Einstein--Maxwell gravity (the Kerr--Newman solution) and low-energy heterotic string theory (the Kerr--Sen black…
Dark matter is undoubtedly one of the fundamental, albeit unknown, components of the standard cosmological model. The failure to detect WIMPs, the most promising candidate particle for cold dark matter, actually opens the way for the…
Superradiant instabilities of spinning black holes can be used to impose strong constraints on ultralight bosons, thus turning black holes into effective particle detectors. However, very little is known about the development of the…
Stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars represent extremes in gravity, density, and magnetic fields. They therefore serve as key objects in the study of multiple frontiers of physics. In addition, their origin (mainly in core-collapse…
\textit{Superradiance} can trigger the formation of an ultra-light boson cloud around a spinning black hole. Once formed, the boson cloud is expected to emit a nearly periodic, long-duration, gravitational-wave signal. For boson masses in…
We examine the shadow cast by a Kerr black hole, focusing on constraints on photons corresponding to different shadow boundaries. The photons are related to different orbital ranges and impact parameter values, creating a map of the shadow…
Accretion disk reflection spectra, including broad iron emission lines, bear the imprints of the strong Doppler shifts and gravitational red-shifts close to black holes. The extremity of these shifts depends on the proximity of the…
We use a recent implementation of the large $D$ expansion in order to construct the higher-dimensional Kerr-Newman black hole and also new charged rotating black bar solutions of the Einstein-Maxwell theory, all with rotation along a single…
The Event Horizon Telescope, a global submillimeter wavelength very long baseline interferometry array, produced the first image of supermassive black hole M87* showing a ring of diameter $\theta_d= 42\pm 3\,\mu$as, inferred a black hole…
Light rays passing very close to black holes may wind several times before escaping. For any given electromagnetic source around the black hole, a distant observer would thus observe two infinite sequences of images on either side of the…
An outstanding prediction of general relativity is the fact that the angular momentum $S$ of an isolated black hole with mass $\mu$ is limited by the Kerr bound, $S\leq G\mu^2/c$. Testing this cornerstone is challenging due to the…
We analyse the superradiant stability of braneworld extremal Kerr and Kerr-Newman black holes under massive scalar perturbation. These black hole solutions differ from their four dimensional counterpart by the presence of a tidal charge,…
We use rotation curve kinematics of 1000 spiral galaxies to investigate if these galaxies could host BH (Black Hole) remnants that once powered the QSO phenomenon. The rotation curves of both early and late-type spirals are used to place…