Related papers: To the Lighthouse
Accreting black holes produce collimated outflows, or jets, that traverse many orders of magnitude in distance, accelerate to relativistic velocities, and collimate into tight opening angles. Of these, perhaps the least understood is jet…
I present a theoretical and numerical (Monte Carlo) N-particle analysis of Penrose scattering processes in the ergosphere of a supermassive Kerr black hole. These GR model calculations reveal that the observed high energies and luminosities…
Blazars are a rare class of active galactic nuclei (AGN) with relativistic jets pointing towards the observer. Jets are thought to be launched as Poynting-flux dominated outflows that accelerate to relativistic speeds at the expense of the…
Supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies are very common. They are known to rotate, accrete, spin down and eject highly relativistic jets; those jets pointed at us all seem to show a spectrum with two strong bumps, one in the TeV…
It has for long been an article of faith among astrophysicists that black hole spin energy is responsible for powering the relativistic jets seen in accreting black holes. Two recent advances have strengthened the case. First, numerical…
The discovery of relativistic jets and superluminal sources associated with accreting X-ray binaries in the Galaxy opened new ways of investigating the physics of outflows from compact objects. The short timescales and relatively large…
Relativistic jets have been found for decades as a key phenomenon in active galactic nuclei (AGNs), compact binary systems, and gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), yet their energy resources remain a mystery. Two competing ideas prevail: one…
Relativistic jets launched by rotating black holes are powerful emitters of non-thermal radiation. Extraction of the rotational energy via electromagnetic stresses produces magnetically-dominated jets, which may become turbulent. Studies of…
Powerful non-thermal emission has been detected coming from relativistic collimated outflows launched in the vicinity of black holes of a very wide range of masses, from few to $\sim 10^{10}$ M$_{\odot}$. At different scales along the…
Recent observations of fast radio bursts (FRBs) indicate a perplexing, inconsistent picture. We propose a unified scenario to interpret diverse FRBs observed. A regular pulsar, otherwise unnoticeable at a cosmological distance, may produce…
Relativistic jets are observed only in the low/hard and intermediate states of X-ray binaries (XRBs), and are switched off in the thermal state, but they appear to be present in both low-luminosity and luminous active galactic nuclei…
Non-thermal magnetospheric processes in the vicinity of supermassive black holes have attracted particular attention in recent times. Gap-type particle acceleration accompanied by curvature and Inverse Compton radiation could in principle…
We provide a comprehensive review of major developments in our understanding of gamma-ray bursts, with particular focus on the discoveries made within the last fifteen years when their true nature was uncovered. We describe the…
The curvature of a relativistic blast wave implies that its emission arrives to observers with a spread in time. This effect is believed to wash out fast variability in the lightcurves of GRB afterglows. We note that the spreading effect is…
VLBI observations of relativistic outflows (jets) in galactic nuclei, complemented with detailed studies made in other spectral domains, have become an effective tool for investigating the physics of nuclear regions in galaxies.…
More than half of all low-redshift AGN exhibit UV and X-ray absorption by highly ionized gas. The observed UV and X-ray absorption lines are almost always blue-shifted at velocities of hundreds of km/s, indicating that the absorbing gas is…
Short Gamma-Ray Bursts (SGRBs) are among the most luminous explosions in the universe, releasing in less than one second the energy emitted by our Galaxy over one year. Despite decades of observations, the nature of their "central-engine"…
The dissipation mechanism that powers gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) remains uncertain almost half a century after their discovery. The two main competing mechanisms are the extensively studied internal shocks and the less studied magnetic…
We present results of recent observations and theoretical modeling of data from black holes accreting at very low luminosities (L/L_Edd ~ 10^{-8}). We discuss our newly developed time-dependent model for episodic ejection of relativistic…
Supermassive black holes are found at the centers of most galaxies and their inspiral is a natural outcome when galaxies merge. The inspiral of these systems is of utmost astrophysical importance as prodigious producers of gravitational…