Related papers: Massive black holes in galactic nuclei: Theory and…
On September 14 2015, the LIGO interferometers captured a gravitational wave (GW) signal from two merging black holes (BHs), opening the era of GW astrophysics. Five BH mergers have been reported so far, three of them involving massive BHs…
We trace the origins and development of black hole thermodynamics across the past half-century, emphasizing the framework's relation to classical thermodynamics, and the vital role played by the notions of equilibrium, stationarity, and…
Space-based observations are beginning to yield detailed information about the stellar kinematics at the very centers of galaxies, within the sphere of gravitational influence of the black hole. The structure and dynamics of these regions…
Supermassive black holes inhabit galactic nuclei, and their presence influences in crucial ways the evolution of the stellar distribution. The low-density cores observed in bright galaxies are probably a result of black hole infall, while…
A significant fraction of cosmological dark matter can be formed by very dense macroscopic objects, for example primordial black holes. Gravitational waves offer a promising way to probe these kinds of dark-matter candidates, in a parameter…
Direct imaging of black hole shadow halos has firmly confirmed the existence of supermassive black holes (SMBHs), with millions of solar masses, residing at the centers of the Milky Way and M87 galaxies. These groundbreaking discoveries…
We investigate the possibility that present-day galactic haloes contain a population of massive black holes (MBHs) that form by hierarchical merging of the black hole remnants of the first stars. Some of the MBHs may be large enough or…
Recent observations and stellar dynamics simulations suggest that thousand solar mass black holes can form in compact massive young star clusters. Any such clusters in the bulge of their host galaxy will spiral to the center within a few…
Understanding the formation of earliest supermassive black holes is a question of prime astrophysical interest. In this chapter, we focus on the formation of massive black holes via gas dynamical processes. The necessary requirement for…
We study the collapse of rapidly rotating supermassive stars that may have formed in the early Universe. By self-consistently simulating the dynamics from the onset of collapse using three-dimensional general-relativistic hydrodynamics with…
We estimate the expected event rate of gravitational wave signals from mergers of supermassive black holes that could be resolved by a space-based interferometer, such as the Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (eLISA), utilising the…
Many galaxies contain supermassive black holes (SMBHs), whose formation and history raise many puzzles. Pulsar timing arrays have recently discovered a low-frequency cosmological "hum" of gravitational waves that may be emitted by SMBH…
A review of the astronomical data of several last years on an astonishingly high amount of black holes in the contemporary and early ($z\sim 10$) universe is presented. Also the data on the recently observed peculiar stars in the Galaxy are…
Supermassive primordial stars forming during catastrophic baryon collapse in atomically-cooling halos at $z \sim$ 15 - 20 may be the origin of the first quasars in the universe. However, no simulation to date has followed the evolution of…
A recent understanding on how quantum effects may affect black-hole evolution opens new scenarios for dark matter, in connection with the presence of black holes in the very early universe. Quantum fluctuations of the geometry allow for…
The evolution of dense star clusters is followed by direct high-accuracy N-body simulation. The problem is to first order a gravitational N-body problem, but stars evolve due to astrophysics and the more massive ones form black holes or…
(Abridged) We review the results of the first multi-scale, hydrodynamical simulations of mergers between galaxies with central supermassive black holes (SMBHs) to investigate the formation of SMBH binaries in galactic nuclei. We demonstrate…
The tidal disruption of stars by (super-)massive black holes in galactic nuclei has been discussed in theoretical terms for about 30 years but only in the past decade have we been able to detect such events in substantial numbers. Thus, we…
Understanding the processes that drive galaxy formation and shape the observed properties of galaxies is one of the most interesting and challenging frontier problems of modern astrophysics. We now know that the evolution of galaxies is…
The most entropic fluid can be related to a dense gas of black holes that we use to study the beginning of the universe. We encounter difficulties to compatibilize an adiabatic expansion with the growing area for the coalescence of black…