Related papers: Imaging a boson star at the Galactic center
The Galactic Center is the closest galactic nucleus that can be studied with unprecedented angular resolution and sensitivity. We summarize recent basic observational results on Sagittarius A* and the conditions for star formation in the…
The observation of the shadows cast by the event horizon of black holes on the light emitted in its neighborhood is the target of current very-long-baseline-interferometric observations. When considering supermassive black holes, the light…
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global 230 GHz VLBI array, achieves an angular resolution of ${\approx} 20\,\mu{\rm as}$, sufficient to resolve the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). This resolution may soon enable…
Upcoming VLBI observations will resolve nearby supermassive black holes, most notably Sagittarius A* and M87, on event horizon-scales. Recent observations of Sagittarius A* with the Event Horizon Telescope have revealed horizon-scale…
Nowadays we believe that a typical galaxy contains about $10^7$ stellar-mass black holes and a single super-massive black hole at its center. According to general relativity, these objects are characterized solely by their mass $M$ and by…
While the event horizon of a black hole could cast a shadow that was observed recently, a central singularity without horizon could also give rise to such a feature. This leaves us with a question on the nature of the supermassive black…
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…
In the present paper some consequences of the assumption that in the center of the Galaxy there is a supermassive compact object without the events horizon are considered. The possibility of existence of such object has been argued earlier.…
Boson stars have attracted much attention in recent decades as simple, self-consistent models of compact objects and also as self-gravitating structures formed in some dark-matter scenarios. Direct detection of these hypothetical objects…
The history of star formation in the strong gravitational potential of the Galactic center has been of much interest, recently. We propose that the sub-parsec-scale disk of massive stars orbiting the massive black hole at the Galactic…
Axions, encompassing both QCD axions and axion-like particles, can generate loop-induced quadratic couplings to electromagnetic field strength tensors, resulting in oscillatory shifts of the fine-structure constant. Near a Kerr black hole,…
The galactic black hole is a supermassive black hole located at the center of a galaxy surrounded by a dark matter halo. For the first time, we establish a generic, fully-relativistic formalism to calculate solutions of Einstein's gravity…
Lensed gravitational waves will offer new means to probe the distribution of matter in the universe, complementary to electromagnetic signals. Lensed continuous gravitational waves provide new challenges and opportunities beyond those of…
The center of the Milky Way hosts a massive black hole. The observational evidence for its existence is overwhelming. The compact radio source Sgr A* has been associated with a black hole since its discovery. In the last decade,…
In this contribution, we revisit the model of a dust-enshrouded star orbiting a low-luminosity galactic nucleus (Zaja\v{c}ek et al. 2014, 2016, 2017). Although it is quite challenging for dust to survive in hot X-ray-emitting plasma…
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration has recently released the first image of a black hole (BH), opening a new window onto tests of general relativity in the strong field regime. In this paper, we derive constraints on the nature…
One class of competitive candidates for dark matter is ultralight bosons. If they exist, these bosons may form long-lived bosonic clouds surrounding rotating black holes via superradiant instabilities, acting as sources of gravity and…
In fully general relativity, we calculate the images of the radiatively inefficient accretion flow (RIAF) surrounding a Kerr black hole with arbitrary spins, inclination angles, and observational wavelengths. For the same initial…
We developed a numerical methodology to compute the fully-relativistic propagation time of photons emitted by a pulsar in orbit around a massive compact object, like the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* in the Galactic Center, whose…
The inferred black hole in the Galactic center spans the largest angle on the sky among all known black holes. Forthcoming observational programs plan to localize or potentially resolve the image of Sgr A* to an exquisite precision,…