Related papers: Massive black holes in galactic nuclei: Theory and…
The growing number of binary black hole mergers detected through gravitational waves offers unprecedented insight into their underlying population, yet their astrophysical formation channels remain unresolved. We present a new method to…
Black holes are among the most intriguing objects in modern physics. Their influence ranges from powering quasars and other active galactic nuclei, to providing key insights into quantum gravity. We review the observational evidence for…
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…
The existence of supermassive black holes lurking in the centers of galaxies and of stellar binary systems containing a black hole with a few solar masses has been established beyond reasonable doubt. The idea that black holes of…
Despite traditional thinking, an appreciable population of massive black holes may be lurking in dwarf galaxies. Prior to the last decade, nearly all massive black holes were found in the nuclei of giant galaxies and the existence of…
I review the status of observational determinations of central masses in nearby galactic nuclei. Results from a variety of techniques are summarized, including ground-based and space-based optical spectroscopy, radio VLBI measurements of…
Massive black holes are nowadays believed to reside in most local galaxies. Studies have also established a number of relations between the MBH mass and properties of the host galaxy such as bulge mass and velocity dispersion. These results…
The rate of gravitational wave bursts from the mergers of massive primordial black holes in clusters is calculated. Such clusters of black holes can be formed through phase transitions in the early Universe. The central black holes in…
Numerical simulations have become a major tool for understanding galaxy formation and evolution. Over the decades the field has made significant progress. It is now possible to simulate the formation of individual galaxies and galaxy…
Massive black hole (MBH) coalescences are powerful sources of low-frequency gravitational waves. To study these events in the cosmological context we need to trace the large-scale structure and cosmic evolution of a statistical population…
The notion that microparsec-scale black holes can be used to probe gigaparsec-scale physics may seem counterintuitive, at first. Yet, the gravitational observatory LISA will detect cosmologically-distant coalescing pairs of massive black…
In the recent years, primordial black holes (PBHs) have emerged as one of the most interesting and hotly debated topics in cosmology. Among other possibilities, PBHs could explain both some of the signals from binary black hole mergers…
The dependence of the parameters of the evolution of scalarly charged Black Holes (BHs) in the early Universe on the parameters of field-theoretic theories of interaction, the influence of the geometric factor of the structure of the…
We investigate a hierarchical structure formation scenario describing the evolution of a Super Massive Black Holes (SMBHs) population. The seeds of the local SMBHs are assumed to be 'pregalactic' black holes, remnants of the first POPIII…
Coalescing massive black hole binaries are produced by the mergers of galaxies. The final stages of the black hole coalescence produce strong gravitational radiation that can be detected by the space-borne LISA. In cases where the black…
We investigate a purely stellar dynamical solution to the Final Parsec Problem. Galactic nuclei resulting from major mergers are not spherical, but show some degree of triaxiality. With $N$-body simulations, we show that massive black hole…
The formation of massive black holes may precede the epoch that characterises the peak of galaxy formation, as characterized by the star formation history in luminous galaxies. Hence protogalactic star formation may be profoundly affected…
With detections of quasars powered by increasingly massive black holes (BHs) at increasingly early times in cosmic history over the past decade, there has been correspondingly rapid progress made on the theory of early BH formation and…
In the last decade, a combination of high sensitivity, high spatial resolution observations and of coordinated multi-wavelength surveys has revolutionized our view of extra-galactic black hole (BH) astrophysics. We now know that…
In the last decades, luminous accreting super-massive black holes have been discovered within the first Gyr after the Big Bang, but their origin is still an unsolved mystery. We discuss our state-of-the-art theoretical knowledge of their…