Related papers: Accretion disks, quasars and cosmology: meandering…
An accretion flow onto a supermassive black hole is the primary process powering quasars. However, a geometry of this flow is not well constrained. Both global MHD simulations and observations suggest that there are several emission…
Proceeding of the "HACK100" Conference, 6-10 June 2022, Trieste, Italy - In recent years, quasars have been shown to be reliable standardizable candles, thanks to the non-linear relation between their X-rays and ultraviolet luminosity.…
We study the accretion flow of a hot gas captured by the black hole gravity in the presence of a thin cold accretion disk. Such geometrical arrangement is expected in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and in galactic X-ray binary systems because…
Our group has developed a technique that makes use of the observed non-linear relation between the ultraviolet and the X-ray luminosity in quasars to provide an independent measurement of their distances, thus turning quasars into…
The cosmic curvature, a fundamental parameter for cosmology could hold deep clues to inflation and cosmic origins. We propose an improved model-independent method to constrain the cosmic curvature by combining the constructed Hubble diagram…
Quasars are thought to be powered by supermassive black holes accreting surrounding gas. Central to this picture is a putative accretion disk which is believed to be the source of the majority of the radiative output. It is well known,…
Slim accretion disks idea emerged over 30 years ago as an answer to several unsolved problems. Since that time there was a tremendous increase in the amount of observational data where this model applies. However, many critical issues on…
We use semi-analytic modeling on top of the Millennium simulation to study the joint formation of galaxies and their embedded supermassive black holes. Our goal is to test scenarios in which black hole accretion and quasar activity are…
Observations of the most distant bright quasars imply that billion solar mass supermassive black holes (SMBH) have to be assembled within the first eight hundred million years. Under our standard galaxy formation scenario such fast growth…
The non-linear relation between X-ray and UV luminosity in quasars can be used to estimate their distance. Recently, we have shown that despite the large dispersion of the relation, a Hubble Diagram made of large samples of quasars can…
The cosmological model is at present not tested between the redshift of the farthest observed supernovae (z ~ 1.4) and that of the Cosmic Microwave Background (z ~ 1,100). Here we introduce a new method to measure the cosmological…
The goal of the present paper is to assess the usefulness of quasars as cosmological distance indicators. We calibrate, in a model-independent way, the non-linear relation between X-ray and UV emission to derive quasar luminosity distances.…
Two families of models are currently considered to describe an accretion flow onto black holes and production of the observed X-ray radiation: (1) a standard cold accretion disk with a hot corona above it and (2) an outer truncated…
We present a model for the cosmological evolution of quasars (QSOs) under the assumption that they are powered by massive accreting black holes. Accretion flows around massive black holes make a transition from high radiative efficiency…
This is a general review on the observations and physics of black hole X-ray binaries and microquasars, with the emphasize on recent developments in the high energy regime. The focus is put on understanding the accretion flows and measuring…
The HI in disk galaxies frequently extends beyond the optical image, and can trace the dark matter there. I briefly highlight the history of high spatial resolution HI imaging, the contribution it made to the dark matter problem, and the…
The light we observe from distant astrophysical objects including supernovae and quasars allows us to determine large distances in terms of a cosmological model. Despite the success of the standard cosmological model in fitting the data,…
We consider a model for quasar formation in which massive black holes are formed and fuelled largely by the accretion of hot gas during the process of galaxy formation. In standard hierarchical collapse models, objects about the size of…
It is commonly believed that accretion discs are truncated and their inner regions are described by advection dominated accretion flows (ADAFs) in the hard spectral state of black hole X-ray binaries. However, the increasing occurrence of a…
The Hubble diagram of quasars, as candidates to ``standardizable" candles, has been used to measure the expansion history of the Universe at late times, up to very high redshifts ($z \sim 7$). It has been shown that this history, as…