Related papers: Evolution of the Black Hole Mass Function in Star …
The mass of super massive black holes at the centre of galaxies is tightly correlated with the mass of the galaxy bulges which host them. This observed correlation implies a mechanism of joint growth, but the precise physical processes…
Observations of elliptical galaxies suggest that black holes (BHs) might serve as dark energy candidates, coupled to the expansion of the Universe. According to this hypothesis, the mass of a BH could increase as the Universe expands. BH…
The mass function of super-massive black holes in our cosmic neighborhood is required to understand the statistics of their activity and consequently the origin of the ultra high energy particles. We determine a mass function of black hole…
We consider the merging of high-mass black-hole binaries of the Cyg X-1 type, in which the O-star companion becomes a neutron star following a supernova explosion. Our estimated rate of mergers, $\sim 2\times 10^{-5} yr^{-1}$ for the…
Most stars form in dense stellar environments. It is speculated that some dense star clusters may host intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), which may have formed from runaway collisions between high-mass stars, or from the mergers of less…
The central regions of galaxies show the presence of massive black holes and/or dense stellar systems. The question about their modes of formation is still under debate. A likely explanation of the formation of the central dense stellar…
We investigate how the properties of massive black hole binaries influence the observed properties of core galaxies. We compare the observed trend in stellar mass deficit as a function of total stellar mass in the core galaxy with predicted…
Ultralight boson is one of the potential candidates for dark matter. If exists, it can be generated by a rapidly rotating black hole via superradiance, extracting the energy and angular momentum of the black hole and forming a boson cloud.…
Recent detections of gravitational waves from mergers of binary black holes (BBHs) with pre-merger source-frame individual masses in the so-called upper mass-gap, expected due to (pulsational) pair instability supernova ((P)PISN), have…
Up to now several gravitational-wave events from the coalescences of black hole binaries have been reported by LIGO/VIRGO, and imply that black holes should have an extended mass function. We work out the merger rate distribution of…
Rapid formation of supermassive black holes occurs in dense nuclear star clusters that are initially gas-dominated. Stellar-mass black hole remnants of the most massive cluster sink into the core, where a massive runaway black hole forms as…
This paper presents results of a series of numerical N-body experiments that describe the merging of galaxy pairs containing a massive black hole in their core. The aim is to study the orbital evolution of the two black holes through the…
It was recently suggested that "cosmologically coupled" black holes with masses that increase in proportion to the volume of the Universe might constitute the physical basis of dark energy. We take this claim at face value and discuss its…
Ultralight bosons are a proposed solution to outstanding problems in cosmology and particle physics: they provide a dark-matter candidate while potentially explaining the strong charge-parity problem. If they exist, ultralight bosons can…
Two spectacular results emerging from recent studies of nearby dead quasars and distant active quasars are (i) the existence of tight relations between the masses of black holes (BHs) and the properties of their host galaxies (spheroid…
Young star clusters are dynamically active stellar systems and are a common birthplace for massive stars. Low-mass star clusters ($\sim{}300-10^3$ M$_\odot$) are more numerous than massive systems and are characterized by a two-body…
We incorporate a model for black hole growth during galaxy mergers into the semi-analytical galaxy formation model based on Lambda-CDM proposed by Baugh et al. (2005). Our black hole model has one free parameter, which we set by matching…
A brief overview of the methods commonly used to determine or estimate the black hole mass in quiescent or active galaxies is presented and it is argued that the use of mass-scaling relations is both a reliable and the preferred method to…
We investigate the possibility that present-day galactic haloes contain a population of massive black holes (MBHs) that form by hierarchical merging of the black hole remnants of the first stars. Some of the MBHs may be large enough or…
The growth of supermassive black holes appears to be driven by galaxy mergers, violent merger-free processes and/or `secular' processes. In order to quantify the effects of secular evolution on black hole growth, we study a sample of active…