Related papers: Black Hole Blackbodies
Ultraluminous supersoft sources (ULSs) are defined by a thermal spectrum with colour temperatures ~0.1 keV, bolometric luminosities ~ a few 10^39 erg/s, and almost no emission above 1 keV. It has never been clear how they fit into the…
We have re-examined the most luminous X-ray sources in the starburst galaxy NGC 4631, using XMM-Newton, Chandra and ROSAT data. The most interesting source is a highly variable supersoft ULX. We suggest that its bolometric luminosity ~ a…
We report on the main results obtained thanks to an observation campaign, performed with XMM-Newton, of four persistent, low-luminosity (Lx ~ 10^34 erg/s) and long-period (P > 200 s) Be accreting pulsars. We found that all sources…
We consider how the radiation pressure of an accreting supermassive hole (SMBH) affects the interstellar medium around it. Much of the gas originally surrounding the hole is swept into a shell with a characteristic radius somewhat larger…
Measurements of the dynamical environment of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are becoming abundant and precise. We use such measurements to look for ultralight dark matter (ULDM), which is predicted to form dense cores ("solitons") in the…
Microscopic black holes explode with their temperature varying inversely as their mass. Such explosions would lead to the highest temperatures in the present universe, all the way to the Planck energy. The possibility that a…
We investigate outflows and the physics of super-Eddington versus sub-Eddington regimes in black hole systems. Our focus is on prospective science using next-generation high-resolution soft X-ray instruments. We highlight the properties of…
We show that Massive Black Holes of AGNs follow the same approximately linear relation with the luminosity of the host spheroid (bulge) found in normal (quiescent) galaxies, with the black hole mass being ~0.002 that of the bulge. We also…
Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are bright extragalactic sources with X-ray luminosities above 10^39 erg/s powered by accretion onto compact objects. According to the first studies performed with XMM-Newton ULXs seemed to be excellent…
Radiation pressure-driven outflows from luminous accreting supermassive black holes are an important part of active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback. The effective Eddington limit, based on absorption of radiation by dust, not electron…
We investigate the production of magnetic flux from rotating black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and compare it with the upper limit of ultrahigh energy cosmic ray (UHECR) luminosities, calculated from observed integral flux of…
It is argued that the qualitative features of black holes, regarded as quantum mechanical objects, depend both on the parameters of the hole and on the microscopic theory in which it is embedded. A thermal description is inadequate for…
At luminosities below a few percent of Eddington, accreting black holes switch to a hard spectral state which is very different from the soft blackbody-like spectral state that is found at higher luminosities. The hard state is…
We study strong gravitational lensing due to a Schwarzschild black hole. Apart from the primary and the secondary images we find a sequence of images on both sides of the optic axis; we call them {\em relativistic images}. These images are…
X-ray and UV absorbing outflows are frequently seen in AGN and have been cited as a possible feedback mechanism. Whether or not they can provide adequate feedback depends on how massive they are and how much energy they carry, but it…
In recent years, the evidence for the existence of an ultra-compact concentration of dark mass associated with the radio source Sgr A* in the Galactic Center has become very strong. However, an unambiguous proof that this object is indeed a…
The nature of the ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULX) is still to be understood. Several hypotheses have been suggested to explain the high X-ray luminosity: stellar mass black holes with emission collimated by relativistic effects or…
We propose a methodology to derive a black-hole mass for super-critical accretion flow. Here, we use the extended disk blackbody (extended DBB) model, a fitting model in which the effective temperature profile obeys the relation $T_{\rm…
The atomic features in the X-ray spectra of the ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX) may be associated with the outflow (Middleton et al. 2015), which may provide a way to explore the physics of the ULXs. We construct a conical outflow model,…
Black holes can be produced in collapse of small-scale dark matter structures, which can happen at any time from the early to present-day universe. Microstructure black holes (MSBHs) can have a wide range of masses. Small MSBHs evaporate…