Related papers: A Forty Year Journey
Despite the no-hair theorem, several notable hairy black hole (BH) solutions exist in both General Relativity and modified gravity theories. For such hairs to be detectable, they must extend sufficiently beyond the event horizon. This idea…
Recent observations of Sgr A* give strong constraints for possible models of the physical nature of Sgr A* and suggest the presence of a massive black~hole with M<2 10^6 M_sun surrounded by an accretion disk which we estimate to radiate at…
The centre of the Milky Way hosts a supermassive black hole of 4 million solar masses called Sagittarius A*. This object has been observed for more than 20 years in the near infrared. This has confirmed some effects of General Relativity.…
The horizon-scale images of supermassive black holes (BHs) by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHT) have provided new opportunities to test general relativity and other theories of gravity. In view of future projects, such as the…
In accretion-based models for Sgr A* the X-ray, infrared, and millimeter emission arise in a hot, geometrically thick accretion flow close to the black hole. The spectrum and size of the source depend on the black hole mass accretion rate…
The 2017 Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations of the central source in M87 have led to the first measurement of the size of a black-hole shadow. This observation offers a new and clean gravitational test of the black-hole metric in…
The discovery of a pulsar (PSR) in orbit around a black hole (BH) is expected to provide a superb new probe of relativistic gravity and BH properties. Apart from a precise mass measurement for the BH, one could expect a clean verification…
The compelling dynamical evidence for massive dark objects in galactic nuclei does not uniquely imply massive black holes (BHs). To argue convincingly that these objects are BHs we must rule out alternatives to a BH, and the alternative to…
The article summarizes the observational evidence for the existence of massive black holes, as well as the current knowledge about their abundance, their mass and spin distributions, and their cosmic evolution within and together with their…
The supermassive black hole at the Galactic center harbors a bound cluster of massive stars that should leave neutron-star remnants. Extrapolating from the available data, we estimate that 100-1000 radio pulsars may presently orbit Sgr A*…
The S-stars in the Galactic center (GC) are anticipated to provide unique dynamical constraint on the spin of the GC massive black hole (MBH). In this paper, we develop a fast full general relativistic method to simultaneously constrain the…
Scalar-tensor theories of gravity generally violate the strong equivalence principle, namely compact objects have a suppressed coupling to the scalar force, causing them to fall slower. A black hole is the extreme example where such a…
Future observations with next-generation large-area radio telescopes are expected to discover radio pulsars (PSRs) closely orbiting around Sagittarius~A* (Sgr~A*), the supermassive black hole (SMBH) dwelling at our Galactic Center (GC).…
The super-massive 4 million solar mass black hole (SMBH) SgrA* shows flare emission from the millimeter to the X-ray domain. The nucleus of the Milky Way has properties (stellar cluster, young stars, molecular gas and an accreting SMBH)…
Although General Relativity (GR) has been tested extensively in the weak gravity regime, similar tests in the strong gravity regime are still missing. In this paper we explore the possibility to use X-ray spectropolarimetric observations of…
We show that at any given time, the Galactocentric black hole Sgr A* is expected to be microlensing N(lens)=1.7 bulge stars if the threshold of detectability of the fainter image is K(thr)=21, and about N(lens)=8 sources if K(thr)=23. The…
The black hole shadow, first observed by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017, is the newest method for studying black holes and understanding gravity. Much work has gone into understanding the shadow of a Kerr black hole, including all of…
Whereas considerable effort has been afforded in understanding the properties of galaxies, a full physical picture, connecting their baryonic and dark-matter content, super-massive black holes, and (metric) theories of gravity, is still…
We discuss experiments achievable via monitoring of stellar dynamics near the massive black hole at the Galactic center with a next generation, extremely large telescope (ELT). Given the likely observational capabilities of an ELT and…
Sagittarius A* (SgrA*) lying in the Galactic Centre $8$ kpc from Earth, hosts the closest supermassive black hole known to us. It is now inactive, but there is evidence indicating that about six million years ago it underwent a powerful…