Related papers: Testing Black Holes with Interstellar Missions: I.…
This resource letter is designed to guide students, educators, and researchers through (some of) the literature on black holes. Both the physics and astrophysics of black holes are discussed. Breadth has been emphasized over depth, and…
This review discusses the current status of supermassive black hole research, as seen from a purely observational standpoint. Since the early '90s, rapid technological advances, most notably the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, the…
The ability of the near future second generation VLTI instrument GRAVITY to constrain the properties of the Galactic center black hole is investigated. The Galactic center infrared flares are used as probes of strong-field gravity, within…
Motion of short-period stars orbiting the supermassive black hole in our Galactic Center has been monitored for more than 20 years. These observations are currently offering a new way to test the gravitational theory in an unexplored…
Neutron stars and black holes are the astrophysical systems with the strongest gravitational fields in the universe. In this article, I review the prospect of probing with observations of such compact objects some of the most intriguing…
In general relativity, astrophysical black holes are uniquely described by the Kerr metric. Observational tests of the Kerr nature of these compact objects and, hence, of general relativity, require a metric that encompasses a broader class…
In this article we discuss a possible way of testing the Kerr black hole hypothesis by taking advantage of phenomena correlated with chaotic motion in the final stages of an accretion disk around a bumpy black hole. We anticipate that these…
One often-used approximation in the study of binary compact objects (i.e., black holes and neutron stars) in general relativity is the instantaneously circular orbit assumption. This approximation has been used extensively, from the…
This chapter describes the prospects for detecting the first black holes in our Universe, with a specific focus on instruments/telescopes that will come online within the next decade, including e.g. the SKA, WFIRST, EUCLID, JWST, and large…
Our universe contains a great number of extremely compact and massive objects which are generally accepted to be black holes. Precise observations of orbital motion near candidate black holes have the potential to determine if they have the…
The historical microlensing surveys MACHO, EROS, MOA and OGLE (hereafter summarized in the MEMO acronym) have searched for microlensing toward the LMC for a total duration of 27 years. We have studied the potential of joining all databases…
The nature of dark matter is still an open problem. The simplest assumption is that gravity is the only force coupled certainly to dark matter and thus the micro black holes could be a viable candidate. We investigated the possibility of…
Black holes were predicted by Einstein General Relativity (GR). Because of unusual properties of these objects their existence is almost unbelievable. There are gravitation theories which do not predict the black hole appearance. By now,…
No. All theoretical predictions for the observational appearance of an accreting supermassive black hole, as measured interferometrically by a sparse Earth-sized array at current observation frequencies, are sensitive to many untested…
Black holes are unique among astrophysical sources: they are the simplest macroscopic objects in the Universe, and they are extraordinary in terms of their ability to convert energy into electromagnetic and gravitational radiation. Our…
This letter aims at showing that the observation of evaporating black holes should allow distinguishing between the usual Hawking behavior and Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) expectations. We present a full Monte-Carlo simulation of the…
We calculate the minimum distance at which one may approach a black hole in a free flyby. It corresponds to r=4m for the Schwarzschild black hole and a probe which was non-relativistic at infinity. The problem is formulated in a way that is…
While until recently they were often considered as exotic objects of dubious existence, in the last decades there have been overwhelming observational evidences for the presence of stellar mass black holes in binary systems, supermassive…
We present the novel capabilities of the enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarimetry (eXTP) mission to study the strong gravity region around stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binary systems and supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei.…
Results of precise measurements of the periods of pulsars discovered in the central regions of globular clusters are shown to be approaching the capabilities of testing the existence of a central black hole. For example, in the case of M 15…