Related papers: Seeing the unseeable
We investigate looking for black hole starships using very high energy gamma ray telescopes. We find they would be above the threshhold of visibility although there are many unknown factors.
The arena normally used in black holes thermodynamics was recently generalized to incorporate a broad class of physically interesting situations. The key idea is to replace the notion of stationary event horizons by that of `isolated…
The spin of a black hole retains the memory of how the black hole grew, and can be a potent source of energy for powering relativistic jets. To understand the diagnostic power and astrophysical significance of black hole spin, however, we…
We have now entered the new era of high-resolution imaging astronomy with the beginning of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The EHT can resolve the dynamics of matter in the immediate vicinity around black holes at and below the horizon…
After exactly a century since the formulation of the general theory of relativity, the phenomenon of gravitational lensing is still an extremely powerful method for investigating in astrophysics and cosmology. Indeed, it is adopted to study…
Collapsed objects have definitely been observed: some are stellar-mass objects, the endpoint of massive stars; others, millions of times more massive, have been discovered in the cores of most galaxies. Their formation poses some…
The defining characteristic of a black hole is that it possesses an event horizon through which matter and energy can fall in but from which nothing escapes. Soft X-ray transients (SXTs), a class of X-ray binaries, appear to confirm this…
Modeling the event horizon of a black hole by a fuzzy sphere it is shown that in the classical limit, for large astrophysical black-holes, the event horizon looks locally like a non-commutative plane with non-commutative parameter dictated…
Black holes are perhaps the most strange and fascinating objects known to exist in the universe. Our understanding of space and time is pushed to its limits by the extreme conditions found in these objects. They can be used as natural…
Recent interferometric observations by the Event Horizon Telescope have resolved the horizon-scale emission from sources in the vicinity of nearby supermassive black holes. Future space-based interferometers promise to measure the "photon…
Space based gravitational wave astronomy will open a completely new window on the Universe and massive black holes binaries are expected to be among the primary actors on this upcoming stage. The New Gravitational-wave Observatory (NGO) is…
Recently, we showed that the possibility of an interstellar mission to the closest black hole, while highly speculative and extremely challenging, is not completely unrealistic within the next few decades. Since such a mission might last…
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is expected to soon produce polarimetric images of the supermassive black hole at the center of the neighboring galaxy M87. There are indications that this black hole is rapidly spinning. General relativity…
Currently envisioned extensions of the Event Horizon Telescope to space will soon target the black hole photon ring: a narrow ring-shaped imprint of a black hole's strong gravity produced in its images by highly bent photon trajectories. In…
Analog models of gravity provide a laboratory setting to investigate curved space phenomena. In this context, linear magnetoelectric materials offer interesting possibilities for modeling such analog geometries. Here, general conditions…
In this paper we propose an experiment designed to observe a general-relativistic effect on single photon interference. The experiment consists of a folded Mach-Zehnder interferometer, with the arms distributed between a single Earth…
Very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) from the ground at millimeter wavelengths can resolve the black hole shadow around two supermassive black holes, Sagittarius A* and M87. The addition of modest telescopes in space would allow the…
The concept of a new space very long baseline interferometry system named the Event Horizon Imager (EHI) has been proposed to dramatically improve black hole imaging and provide precise tests of the theory of general relativity. We…
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), now with its first ever image of the photon ring around the supermassive black hole of M87, provides a unique opportunity to probe the physics of supermassive black holes through Very Long Baseline…
Quite recently, some new mathematical approaches to black holes have appeared in the literature. They do not rely on the classical concept of event horizon -- which is very global, but on the local concept of hypersurfaces foliated by…