Related papers: Black Hole Demographics
Evidence shows that massive black holes 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…
Galaxy haloes contain fundamental clues about the galaxy formation and evolution process: hierarchical cosmological models predict haloes to be ubiquitous, and to be (at least in part) the product of past merger and/or accretion events. The…
Establishing the morphological history of ordinary galaxies was one of the original goals for the Hubble Space Telescope, and remarkable progress toward achieving this this goal has been made. How much of this progress has been at the…
The formation and growth of black holes can strongly influence the distribution of dark matter around them. I discuss here the different types of dark matter overdensities around black holes, including dark matter cusps, spikes, mounds,…
In this short note, we draw attention to the possibility that, under favorable conditions, the final parsec problem could be alleviated by the presence of a moderate population of intermediate mass black holes in the centers of merged…
Massive black holes are key inhabitants of the nuclei of galaxies. Moreover, their astrophysical relevance has gained significant traction in recent years, thanks especially to the amazing results that are being (or will be) delivered by…
Classical black holes are solutions of the field equations of General Relativity. Many astronomical observations suggest that black holes really exist in nature. However, an unambiguous proof for their existence is still lacking. Neither…
The last decade has witnessed significant progress in our understanding of the growth of super-massive black holes (SMBHs). It is now clear that an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN: the observed manifestation of a growing SMBH) is an "event"…
Black holes are often characterized by event horizons, following the literature that laid the mathematical foundations of the subject in the 1970s. However black hole event horizons have two fundamental conceptual limitations. First, they…
We present a novel self-consistent theoretical framework to characterize the formation, evolution, and merger sites of dynamically-formed black hole binaries, with a focus on explaining the most massive events observed by the…
JWST is revealing a new remarkable population of high-redshift ($z\gtrsim4$), low-luminosity Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) in deep surveys and detecting the host galaxy stellar light in the most luminous and massive quasars at $z\sim 6$ for…
The recent discovery of three off-nuclear tidal disruption events (EP240222a, AT2024tvd, and AT2025abcr) - following the first such source, 3XMM J2150$-$05 - reveals a small but robust population of off-nuclear, or `wandering', black holes…
We investigate the possibility that present-day galaxies and their dark matter haloes contain a population of massive black holes (MBHs) that form by hierarchical merging of the black hole remnants of the first stars in the Universe. Some…
For building the super-massive black hole population within a Hubble time, only sub-populations with more than 10^52 erg/s / L objects on the sky are relevant, where L is the sample-averaged bolometric luminosity.
Older and more recent pieces of observational evidence suggest a strong connection between QSOs and galaxies; in particular, the recently discovered correlation between black hole and galactic bulge masses suggests that QSO activity is…
Early JWST observations have uncovered a new population of red sources that might represent a previously overlooked phase of supermassive black hole growth (Kocevski et al. 2023; Matthee et al. 2023, Labb\'e et al. 2023). One of the most…
This is a review of current theory of black-hole dynamics, concentrating on the framework in terms of trapping horizons. Summaries are given of the history, the classical theory of black holes, the defining ideas of dynamical black holes,…
We investigate a large number of cosmological evolution models for QSOs and Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). We introduce a spectrum-luminosity correlation as a new input parameter and adopt the estimated mass function (MF) of massive black…
We investigate the `Local Hole', an anomalous under-density in the local galaxy environment, by extending our previous galaxy $K-$band number-redshift and number-magnitude counts to $\approx 90\%$ of the sky. Our redshift samples are taken…
Over the last decade optical spectroscopic surveys have characterized the low redshift galaxy population and uncovered populations of star-forming galaxies back to z ~ 7. This work has shown that the primary epoch of galaxy building and…