Related papers: A Forty Year Journey
Globular star clusters contain thousands to millions of old stars packed within a region only tens of light years across. Their high stellar densities make it very probable that their member stars will interact or collide. There has been…
Massive black holes (MBHs) exist in the Galactic center (GC) and other nearby galactic nuclei. As natural outcome of galaxy mergers, some MBHs may have a black hole (BH) companion. In this paper, assuming that the MBHs in the GC and some…
Kerr black holes with synchronised hair [arXiv:1403.2757, arXiv:1603.02687] are a counter example to the no hair conjecture, in General Relativity minimally coupled to simple matter fields (with mass $\mu$) obeying all energy conditions.…
The critical steps leading to the uniqueness theorem for the Kerr-Newman metric are reexamined in the light of the new black hole solutions with Yang-Mills and scalar hair. Various methods -- including scaling techniques, arguments based on…
There is now abundant evidence that the luminosity of the Galactic super-massive black hole (SMBH) has not always been as low as it is nowadays. The observation of varying non-thermal diffuse X-ray emission in molecular complexes in the…
Observations of stars and pulsars orbiting the black hole in the center of the Milky Way offer the potential of measuring not only the mass of the black hole but also its spin and quadrupole moment, thereby providing observational…
The compact dark objects with very large masses residing at the centres of galaxies are believed to be black holes. Due to the gravitational lensing effect, they would cast a shadow larger than their horizon size over the background, whose…
Every large galaxy has a black hole in its center. The interaction between the black hole and their host profoundly shapes galactic evolution and the Universe as a whole. The key feature of this interaction are black hole jets - or more…
We discuss the possibility of detecting the presence of primordial black holes (PBHs), such as those that might account for galactic dark matter, using modification of pulsar timing residuals when PBHs pass within ~1000 AU and impart…
The Event Horizon Telescope Consortium is on the verge to provide the first telescopic image of massive black holes SgrA* and M87* surrounded by accretion disks, at a resolution scale comparable to the size of their event horizons. Well…
We show that the recently-discovered orbits of massive stars with closest approach of ~10^3 Schwarzschild radii from SgrA*, allow winds from these stars to provide the required mass deposition rate near the black hole horizon. The observed…
We present the first fully relativistic study of gravitational radiation from bodies in circular equatorial orbits around the massive black hole at the Galactic Center, Sgr A* and we assess the detectability of various kinds of objects by…
This review discusses the current status of supermassive black hole research, as seen from a purely observational standpoint. Since the early '90s, rapid technological advances, most notably the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, the…
With references to both key and oft-forgotten pioneering works, this article starts by presenting a review into how we came to believe in the existence of massive black holes at the centres of galaxies. It then presents the historical…
A long standing goal in astrophysics is to directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole with angular resolution comparable to the event horizon. Realizing this goal would open a new window on the study of General Relativity in…
Motion of short-period stars orbiting the supermassive black hole in our Galactic Center has been monitored for more than 20 years. These observations are currently offering a new way to test the gravitational theory in an unexplored…
Thanks to the release of the extraordinary EHT image of shadow attributed to the M87* supermassive black hole (SMBH), we have a novel window to assess the validity of fundamental physics in the strong-field regime. Motivated by this, we…
The discovery of a relationship between supermassive black hole (SMBH) mass and spiral arm pitch angle (P) is evidence that SMBHs are tied to the overall secular evolution of a galaxy. The discovery of SMBHs in late-type galaxies with…
Within 5-10 years, submillimeter VLBI facilities will be hopefully able to image the "shadow" of SgrA$^*$. When a black hole is surrounded by an optically thin emitting medium, the boundary of the shadow corresponds to the apparent photon…
The spins of a number of supermassive and stellar-mass black holes have been measured based on detections of thermal continuum emission and relativistically broadened iron lines in their x-ray spectra. Likewise, quasiperiodic variability…