Related papers: Observational Constraints on Black Hole Spin
In addition to providing vital clues as to the formation and evolution of black holes, the spin of black holes may be an important energy source in the Universe. Over the past couple of years, tremendous progress has been made in the realm…
The co-evolution of a supermassive black hole with its host galaxy through cosmic time is encoded in its spin. At $z>2$, supermassive black holes are thought to grow mostly by merger-driven accretion leading to high spin. However, it is…
Binary black hole spins are among the key observables for gravitational wave astronomy. Among the spin parameters, their orientations within the orbital plane, $\phi_1$, $\phi_2$ and $\Delta \phi=\phi_1-\phi_2$, are critical for…
X-ray reflection spectroscopy has evolved as one of the leading methods to measure black hole spins. However, the question is whether its measurements are subjected to systematic biases, especially considering the possible discrepancy…
Mass and spin are two fundamental properties of astrophysical black holes. While some established, indirect methods are adopted to measure both these properties of active galactic nuclei (AGN) when viewed relatively face-on, very few…
The spin measurement of black holes has important implications in physics and astrophysics. Regardless of the specific technique to estimate the black hole spin, all the current approaches assume that the space-time geometry around the…
Gravitational waves emitted during the merger of two black holes carry information about the remnant black hole, namely its mass and spin. This information is typically found from the ringdown radiation as the black hole settles to a final…
Over the last decades X-ray spectroscopy has proven to be a powerful tool for the estimation of black hole spin and several other key parameters in dozens of AGN and black hole X-ray binaries. In this White Paper, we discuss the…
The two established techniques for measuring black hole spin in X-ray binaries often yield conflicting results, which must be resolved before either method may be deemed robust. In practice, black hole spin measurements based on fitting the…
The spin distribution of massive black holes (MBHs) contains rich information on their assembly history. However, only limited information can be extracted from currently available spin measurements of MBHs owing to the small sample size…
The rotational properties of astrophysical black holes are fundamental quantities that characterization the black holes. A new method to empirically determine the spin mass-energy characteristics of astrophysical black holes is presented…
Measuring the spins of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in active galactic nuclei (AGN) can inform us about the relative role of gas accretion vs. mergers in recent epochs of the life of the host galaxy and its AGN. Recent advances in…
Recent studies of accretion onto supermassive black hole binaries suggest that much, perhaps most, of the matter eventually accretes onto one hole or the other. If so, then for binaries whose inspiral from ~1 pc to 0.001 - 0.01 pc is driven…
In a recent paper arXiv:0709.0299, we introduced a spin expansion that provides a simple yet powerful way to understand aspects of binary black hole (BBH) merger. This approach relies on the symmetry properties of initial and final…
Ultralight bosons can form clouds around rotating black holes if their Compton wavelength is comparable to the black hole size. The boson cloud spins down the black hole through a process called superradiance, lowering the black hole spin…
As a first step towards understanding the angular momentum evolution history of black holes in merging black-hole/neutron-star binaries, we perform population synthesis calculations to track the distribution of accretion histories of…
Can we determine a spin parameter of a black hole by observation of a black hole shadow in an accretion disk? In order to answer this question, we make a qualitative analysis and a quantitative analysis of a shape and a position of a black…
Supermassive black holes at the centre of galactic nuclei mostly grow in mass through gas accretion over cosmic time. This process also modifies the angular momentum (or spin) of black holes, both in magnitude and in orientation. Despite…
Future X-ray instrumentation is expected to allow us to significantly improve the constraints derivedfrom the Fe K lines in AGN, such as the black-hole angular momentum (spin) and the inclination angle of the putative accretion disk. We…
Spin parameters of stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries are currently being estimated by fitting the X-ray continuum spectra of their accretion disk emission. For this method, it is necessary to know the inclination of the…