Related papers: Five misconceptions about black holes
Black holes, dark energy, and the Higgs field are all currently established, exciting, and mysterious, each in its own way. Cosmological data show that dark energy may evolve with time. The electroweak phase transition during stellar…
Primordial black holes may form in the early Universe, for example from the collapse of large amplitude density perturbations predicted in some inflationary models. Light black holes undergo Hawking evaporation, the energy injection from…
The prediction that black holes radiate due to quantum effects is often considered one of the most secure in quantum field theory in curved space-time. Yet this prediction rests on two dubious assumptions: that ordinary physics may be…
The discovery of high redshift quasars represents a challenge to the origin of supermassive black holes. Here, two evolutionary scenarios are considered. The first one concerns massive black holes in the local universe, which in a large…
Regular (non-singular) space-times are given which describe the formation of a (locally defined) black hole from an initial vacuum region, its quiescence as a static region, and its subsequent evaporation to a vacuum region. The static…
A common mechanism to form primordial black holes in the early universe is by enhancing at small-scales the scalar perturbations generated during inflation. If these fluctuations have a large enough amplitude, they may collapse into…
We present a general sufficient condition for the formation of black holes due to concentration of angular momentum. This is expressed in the form of a universal inequality, relating the size and angular momentum of bodies, and is proven in…
Everybody knows what the classical black holes are. In short, this is a spacetime region beyond the so-called event horizon. The notion of the event horizon is mathematically well defined. The situation with a definition of quantum black…
Black and white holes play remarkably contrasting roles in general relativity versus observational astrophysics. While there is overwhelming observational evidence for the existence of compact objects that are "cold, dark, and heavy", which…
In general relativity, isolated black holes are invisible due to an infinitely large redshift of photons propagating from the event horizon to the remote observer. However, the dark shadow (silhouette) of a black hole can be visible on the…
Small black holes should have formed in the early Universe if the density contrast was high enough. This article aims at giving a - biased and partial - short overview of the latest breakthroughs in this field. It first deals with tentative…
These are the lecture notes for an introductory course on black holes and some aspects of their interaction with the classical and quantum world. The focus is on phenomena of "fundamental physics" in the immediate surroundings of the black…
Black holes are extreme manifestations of general relativity, so one might hope that exotic quantum effects would be amplified in their vicinities, perhaps providing clues to quantum gravity. The commonly accepted treatment of quantum…
The astrophysical processes that led to the formation of the first seed black holes and to their growth into the supermassive variety that powers bright quasars at redshift 6 are poorly understood. In standard LCDM hierarchical cosmologies,…
Objects that are on the verge of being extremal black holes but actually are distinct in many ways are called quasi-black holes. Quasi-black holes are defined here and treated in a unified way through the displaying of their properties. The…
Higher-dimensional scenarios allow for the formation of mini-black holes from TeV-scale particle collisions. The purpose of this paper is to review and compare different methods for the estimate of the total gravitational energy emitted in…
Black holes are among the most well-known astrophysical objects, yet their physical realisation remains conceptually subtle. We analyse physical black holes -- light-trapping regions that form in finite time as seen by a distant observer --…
Production of high-energy gravitational objects is a common feature of gravitational theories. The primordial universe is a natural setting for the creation of black holes and other nonperturbative gravitational entities. Cosmic black holes…
We consider black hole - galaxy coevolution using simple analytic arguments. We focus on the fact that several supermassive black holes are known with masses significantly larger than suggested by the $M - {\sigma}$ relation, sometimes also…
Black holes are capable of reflection: there is a finite probability for any particle that approaches the event horizon to bounce back. The albedo of the black hole depends on its temperature and the energy of the incoming particle. The…