Related papers: Method for detecting a boson star at Sgr A* throug…
Holz & Wheeler (\cite{hw}) have recently proposed that a Schwarzschild black hole may act as a retro-lens which, if illuminated by a powerful light source, deflects light ray paths to large bending angles and a series of luminous arcs (or…
Accreting black holes are believed to be sites of possible particle acceleration with favorable conditions also for effective gamma-ray production. However, because of photon-photon pair production, only low energy (MeV) gamma-rays can…
Compact remnants -- stellar mass black holes and neutron stars formed in the inner few parsec of galactic centres are predicted to sink into the central parsec due to dynamical friction on low mass stars, forming a high concentration cusp…
Searching for space-time variations of the constants of Nature is a promising way to search for new physics beyond General Relativity and the standard model motivated by unification theories and models of dark matter and dark energy. We…
We consider compact boson stars that arise for a V-shaped scalar field potential. They represent a one parameter family of solutions of the scaled Einstein-signum-Gordon equations. We analyze the physical properties of these solutions and…
Boson Stars are, at present, hypothetical compact stellar objects whose existence, however, could resolve several enigmas of current astrophysics. If they exist, either as independent astrophysical entities or as a matter admixture of more…
It has been shown that scalar fields can form gravitationally bound compact objects called boson stars. In this study, we analyze boson star configurations where the scalar fields contain a small amount of angular momentum and find two new…
Most galactic nuclei are now believed to harbour supermassive black holes. Studies of stellar motions in the central few light-years of our Milky Way Galaxy indicate the presence of a dark object with a mass of about 2.6 million solar…
Boson stars consist of a system of self-gravitating scalar fields which form a macroscopic quantum state and are a possible dark matter candidate. In this paper, we address the existence of boson stars in Brans-Dicke gravity. We show that…
Boson stars are gravitationally bound objects that arise in ultralight dark matter models and form in the centers of galactic halos or axion miniclusters. We systematically study the excitations of a boson star, taking into account the…
We study novel solitonic solutions to Einstein-Klein-Gordon theory in the presence of a periodic scalar potential arising in models of axion-like particles. The potential depends on two parameters: the mass of the scalar field $m_a$ and the…
We show how observations of multiply-imaged quasars at high redshift can be used as a probe of dark matter clumps (subhalos with masses ~ 10^9 solar masses) within the virialized extent of more massive lensing halos. A large abundance of…
The hierarchical nature of galaxy formation suggests that a supermassive black hole binary could exist in our galactic center. We propose a new approach to constraining the possible orbital configuration of such a binary companion to the…
The detection of a sub-solar mass black hole could yield dramatic new insights into the nature of dark matter and early-Universe physics, as such objects lack a traditional astrophysical formation mechanism. Gravitational waves allow for…
Dark Matter could potentially manifest itself in the form of asymmetric dark stars. In this paper we entertain the possibility of probing such asymmetric bosonic dark matter stars by the use of atomic clocks. If the dark sector connects to…
Real scalar fields, e.g. the axion, cannot condensate into stationary solitonic configurations to form star-like structures, eventually either dispersing or collapsing. However, by relaxing the stationarity condition on the metric, it has…
We study in detail gravitational lensing caused by a supermassive fermion star and compare it with lensing by a black hole of the same mass. It is argued that lensing effects, being very distinct, may shed some light on the yet unexplained…
Astronomers have been using the measured luminosity to estimate the {\em luminous mass} of stars, based on empirically established mass-to-light ratio which seems to be only applicable to a special class of stars---the main-sequence…
The Galactic Centre has been studied with the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) for over 10 years, revealing a bright, complex gamma-ray morphology. Besides a strong point-like very-high-energy gamma-ray source coincident with the…
Light rays passing very close to a black hole may experience very strong deviations. Two geometries were separately considered in the recent literature: a source behind the black hole (standard gravitational lensing); a source in front of…