Related papers: Testing Black Holes with Interstellar Missions: I.…
The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the exciting field of black hole quasi-normal modes and its capabilities to test general relativity in the 21st century. After motivating this line of research, we provide a…
In the coming decade, gravitational waves will convert the study of general relativistic aspects of black holes and stars from a largely theoretical enterprise to a highly interactive, observational/theoretical one. For example,…
Black holes are real astrophysical objects, but their interiors are hidden and can only be "observed" through mathematics. The structure of rotating black holes is typically illustrated with the help of special coordinates. But any such…
Primordial black holes (PBHs) remain a viable dark matter candidate in the asteroid-mass range. We point out that in this scenario, the PBH abundance would be large enough for at least one object to cross through the inner Solar System per…
Black holes represent extreme conditions of physical laws. Being predicted about a century ago, they are now accepted as astrophysical reality by most of the scientific community. Only recently more direct evidence of their existence has…
In this small review we present the actual state the knowledge about weighting black holes. Black holes can be found in stellar binary systems in our Galaxy and in other nearby galaxies, in globular clusters, which we can see in our and…
It has been suggested that maximally spinning black holes can serve as particle accelerators, reaching arbitrarily high center-of-mass energies. Despite several objections regarding the practical achievability of such high energies, and…
Stellar microlensing surveys are a powerful tool for probing dark matter in the form of planetary and stellar mass compact objects (COs), in particular primordial black holes (PBHs). Under standard assumptions, current observations exclude…
Collapsed objects have definitely been observed: some are stellar-mass objects, the endpoint of massive stars; others, millions of times more massive, have been discovered in the cores of most galaxies. Their formation poses some…
In the science fiction film $Interstellar$, a band of intrepid astronauts sets out to explore a system of planets orbiting a supermassive black hole, searching for a world that may be conducive to hosting human life. While the film…
Black holes are by definition black, and therefore cannot be directly observed by using electromagnetic radiations. Convincing identification of black holes must necessarily depend on the identification of a very specially behaving matter…
Observation of an exploding black hole would provide the first direct evidence of primordial black holes, the first direct evidence of Hawking radiation, and definitive information on the particles present in nature. However, indirect…
We consider test planet and photon orbits of the third kind inside a black hole, which are stable, periodic and neither come out of the black hole nor terminate at the singularity. Interiors of supermassive black holes may be inhabited by…
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…
The analysis of the properties of the X-ray radiation emitted from geometrically thin accretion disks around black holes can be a powerful tool to test General Relativity in the strong field regime. This chapter reviews the state-of-the-art…
In this Letter, we demonstrate that short-period stars orbiting around the supermassive black hole in our Galactic Center can successfully be used to probe the gravitational theory in a strong regime. We use 19 years of observations of the…
The theory of General Relativity has successfully passed a large number of observational tests. The theory has been extensively tested in the weak-field regime with experiments in the Solar System and observations of binary pulsars.…
Possible existence of black holes remnants provides a suitable candidates for dark matter. In this paper we study the possibility of existence for such remnants. We consider quantum gravitational induced corrections of black hole's entropy…
The state of the searches for isolated black holes, non-accreting black holes in binary systems and, finally, the accreting black holes in the X-ray binaries is presented. The third category is, by far, the most important source of…
OGLE and other projects are likely to discover first stellar mass black holes and the first planets through gravitational lensing in the next year or two. It is important to have follow-up projects ready, using diverse observing methods.…