Related papers: Revisiting Stellar Orbits and the Sgr A$^*$ Quadru…
No-hair theorems are uniqueness results constraining the form of the metric of black holes in general relativity. These theorems are typically formulated under idealized assumptions, involving a mixture of local (regularity of the horizon)…
The space missions CoRoT and Kepler provide high quality data that allow us to test the transport of angular momentum in stars by the seismic determination of the internal rotation profile. Our aim is to test the validity of the seismic…
Precise measurements of the S-stars orbiting SgrA* have set strong constraints on the nature of the compact object at the centre of the Milky Way. The presence of a black hole in that region is well established, but its neighboring…
The Event Horizon Telescope is a millimeter VLBI array that aims to take the first pictures of the black holes in the center of the Milky Way and of the M87 galaxy, with horizon scale resolution. Measurements of the shape and size of the…
The continuum-fitting method is one of the two most advanced methods of determining the black hole spin in accreting X-ray binary systems. There are, however, still some unresolved issues with the underlying disk models. One of them…
I try to describe the stepwise progress in proving that massive black holes do exist in the Universe. As compared to forty years ago, measurements have pushed the 'size' of the 4 million solar mass concentration in the Galactic Center…
Stellar spin is one of the fundamental quantities that characterize a star itself and its planetary system. Nevertheless, stellar spin-down mechanisms in protostellar and pre-main-sequence stellar phases have been a long-standing problem in…
We compare the angular momentum extracted by a wind from a pre-main-sequence star to the torques arising from the interaction between the star and its Keplerian accretion disk. We find that the wind alone can counteract the spin-up torque…
Context. Observations at sub-millimeter and mm wavelengths will in the near future be able to resolve the radial dependence of the mm spectral slope in circumstellar disks with a resolution of around a few AU at the distance of the closest…
We propose a novel method to test the binary black hole (BBH) nature of compact binaries detectable by gravitational wave (GW) interferometers and hence constrain the parameter space of other exotic compact objects. The spirit of the test…
Black holes in General Relativity are famously characterized by two "hairs" only, the mass and the spin of the Kerr spacetime. Theories extending General Relativity, however, allow in principle for additional black hole charges, which will…
We have argued previously that the infinitely many gauge symmetries of string theory provide an infinite set of conserved (gauge) quantum numbers ($W$-hair) which characterise black hole states and maintain quantum coherence. Here we study…
Advances in optical astrometry allow us to infer the non-radial kinematic structure of the Universe directly from observations. Here I use a supervised machine learning neural network method to predict 1.57 million redshifts based on…
Robustly measuring binary black hole spins via gravitational waves is key to understanding these systems' astrophysical origins, but remains challenging -- especially for high-mass systems, whose signals are short and dominated by the…
We test a particular theory of dark matter in which dark matter axions form ring "caustics" in the plane of the Milky Way against actual observations of Milky Way stars. According to this theory, cold, collisionless dark matter particles…
According to the no-hair theorem, astrophysical black holes are uniquely characterized by their masses and spins and are described by the Kerr metric. Several parametric spacetimes which deviate from the Kerr metric have been proposed in…
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…
The classical no-hair theorem states that stationary black holes in general relativity can be completely described by only a small set of global parameters. Within this framework, no additional geometric structures are expected to persist…
The S-star cluster in the Galactic center allows us to study the physics close to a supermassive black hole, including distinctive dynamical tests of general relativity. Our best estimates for the mass of and the distance to Sgr A* using…
Space- and time-resolved measurements of spin drift and diffusion are performed on a GaAs-hosted two-dimensional electron gas. For spins where forward drift is compensated by backward diffusion, we find a precession frequency in absence of…