Related papers: Black Hole Winds II: Hyper-Eddington Winds and Fee…
(Abridged) We present two-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations of slowly rotating gas that is under the influence of the gravity of a super massive black hole and is irradiated by a thin UV accretion disc and a spherical X-ray corona. We…
Radiation pressure-dominated accretion disks are predicted to exhibit strong density inhomogeneities on scales much smaller than the disk scale height, due to the nonlinear development of photon bubble instability. Radiation would escape…
Nearby galaxies host ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs), whose nature remains largely unknown. Until the discovery of the first ULX pulsar, M82 X-2, the mechanism powering the large luminosities of most ULXs was thought to be…
Mass outflows from Eddington-limited accreting compact objects appear to be a very widespread phenomenon. They may provide the soft excess observed in quasars and ULXs, and imply that such objects have a major effect on their surroundings.…
We have re-examined the most luminous X-ray sources in the starburst galaxy NGC 4631, using XMM-Newton, Chandra and ROSAT data. The most interesting source is a highly variable supersoft ULX. We suggest that its bolometric luminosity ~ a…
Most ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are believed to be stellar mass black holes or neutron stars accreting beyond the Eddington limit. Determining the nature of the compact object and the accretion mode from broadband spectroscopy is…
Ultra-Luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are accreting black holes for which their X-ray properties have been seen to be different to the case of stellar-mass black hole binaries. For most of the cases their intrinsic energy spectra are well…
Winds play a significant role in active galactic nuclei feedback process. Previous simulations studying winds only focus on a small dynamical range. Therefore, it is unknown how far the winds can go and what the properties of the winds will…
Recently, the issue of the role of the Eddington limit in accretion discs became a matter of debate. While the classical (spherical) Eddington limit is certainly an over-simplification, it is not really clear how to treat it in a flattened…
We present Chandra observations of 12 galaxies that contain supermassive black holes with dynamical mass measurements. Each galaxy was observed for 30 ksec and resulted in a total of 68 point source detections in the target galaxies…
We report the results of Chandra and XMM-Newton observations of an ultra-luminous supersoft X-ray source in M101. M101 ULX-1 underwent 2 outbursts in 2004 during which the peak bolometric luminosities reached 1e41 erg/s. The outburst…
In the last few years multiwavelength observations have boosted our understanding of Ultraluminous X-ray Sources (ULXs). Yet, the most fundamental questions on ULXs still remain to be definitively answered: do they contain stellar or…
We assess the claim that Ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) host intermediate-mass black holes (BH) by comparing the cool disc-blackbody model with a range of other models, namelly a more complex physical model based on a power-law…
The Ultra Luminous X-ray (ULX) source HLX-1 in the galaxy ESO 243-49 has an observed maximum unabsorbed X-ray luminosity of 1.3e42 erg/s (0.2-10.0 keV). From the conservative assumption that this value exceeds the Eddington limit by at most…
Super-Eddington accretion is one scenario that may explain the rapid assembly of $\sim 10^9\rm\, M_\odot$ supermassive black holes (BHs) within the first billion year of the Universe. This critical regime is associated with radiatively…
By performing two-dimensional radiation hydrodynamics simulations with large computational domain of 5000 Schwarzschild radius, we revealed that wide-angle outflow is launched via the radiation force from the super-critical accretion flows…
We study the long-term evolution of the global structure of axisymmetric accretion flows onto a black hole (BH) at rates substantially higher than the Eddington value ($\dot{M}_{\rm Edd}$), performing two-dimensional hydrodynamical…
The ultra-luminous X-ray (ULX) source ESO 243-49 HLX-1 currently provides the strongest evidence for the existence of intermediate mass black holes. We conduct an ongoing monitoring campaign with the Swift X-ray Telescope and found that…
M82 X-1 is one of the brightest ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) known, which, assuming Eddington-limited accretion and other considerations, makes it one of the best intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) candidates. However, the ULX may…
Formation of supermassive black holes (BHs) remains a theoretical challenge. In many models, especially beginning from stellar relic "seeds," this requires sustained super-Eddington accretion. While studies have shown BHs can violate the…