Related papers: Prospects for probing strong gravity with a pulsar…
General relativity is one of the pillars of modern physics. For decades, the theory has been mainly tested in the weak field regime with experiments in the Solar System and radio observations of binary pulsars. Until 2015, the strong field…
According to the no-hair theorem, astrophysical black holes are uniquely described by their mass and spin. In this paper, we review a new framework for testing the no-hair hypothesis with observations in the electromagnetic spectrum. The…
Several stars orbit around a black hole candidate of mass $3.7\times 10^6$ M$_{\odot}$, in the region of the Galactic Center (GC). Looking for General Relativistic (GR) periastron shifts is limited by the existence of a stellar cluster…
Black holes (BHs) formed by collapsing and/or merging of magnetized progenitors, have magnetic fields penetrating the event horizon, and there are several possible scenarios. Thus, the no-hair theorem that assumes the outside medium is a…
We show that scalar hair can be added to rotating, vacuum black holes of general relativity. These hairy black holes (HBHs) clarify a lingering question concerning gravitational solitons: if a black hole can be added at the centre of a…
The mass ($M_\mathrm{BH}$) of a supermassive black hole (SMBH) can be measured using spatially-resolved kinematics of the region where the SMBH dominates gravitationally. The most reliable measurements are those that resolve the smallest…
Black holes orbiting the Super Massive Black Hole (SMBH) Sgr A* in the Milky-way galaxy center (GC) generate gravitational waves. The spectrum, due to stars and black holes, is continuous below 40 nHz while individual BHs within about 200…
While Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity (GR) has been tested extensively in our solar system, it is just beginning to be tested in the strong gravitational fields that surround black holes. As a way to study the behavior of…
Primordial black holes (PBHs) with masses between $10^{14}$ and $10^{20}$ kg are candidates to contribute a substantial fraction of the total dark matter abundance. When in orbit around the center of a star, which can possibly be a…
For a distorted black hole (BH), its ringdown waveform is a superposition of quasi-normal modes (QNMs). In general relativity (GR), the lower order QNM frequencies and damping rates can be well approximated by a polynomial of BH's…
If primordial black holes (PBHs) of asteroidal mass make up the entire dark matter, they could be detectable through their gravitational influence in the solar system. In this work, we study the perturbations that PBHs induce on the orbits…
Pulsars, if existing and detectable in the immediate vicinity of the massive black hole (MBH) in the Galactic center (GC), may be used as a superb tool to probe both the environment and the metric of the central MBH. The recent discovery of…
Supermassive black hole binaries are the strongest gravitational wave sources in the universe. The systems most likely to be observed with pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) will have particularly high masses ($\gtrsim 10^9 M_\odot$), long periods…
The application of the virial theorem provides a tool to estimate supermassive black hole (BH) masses in large samples of active galactic nuclei (AGN) with broad emission lines at all redshifts and luminosities, if the broad line region…
Pulsar timing measurements can be used to detect gravitational radiation from massive black hole binaries. The ~106d quasi-periodic flux variations in Sagittarius A* at radio wavelengths reported by Zhao, Bower, & Goss (2001) may be due to…
While an axion-clouded black hole (BH) encounters a pulsar (PSR) or has a PSR companion, a "gravitational molecule" can be formed. In such a system, the axion cloud evolves at the binary hybrid orbitals, as it happens at microscopic level…
The initial results from timing observations of PSR J1141-6545, a relativistic pulsar white-dwarf binary system, are presented. Predictions from the timing baseline hint at the most stringent test of gravity by an asymmetric binary yet. The…
Astrophysical black holes (BHs) have two fundamental properties: mass and spin. While the mass-evolution of BHs has been extensively studied, much less work has been done on predicting the distribution of BH spins. In this paper we present…
In the past decades, the phenomenology of fast time variations of high-energy flux from black-hole binaries has increased, thanks to the availability of more and more sophisticated space observatories, and a complex picture has emerged.…
Neutron stars and black holes are the astrophysical systems with the strongest gravitational fields in the universe. In this article, I review the prospect of probing with observations of such compact objects some of the most intriguing…