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The development of sensitive large format imaging arrays for the infrared promises to provide revolutionary capabilities for space astronomy. For example, the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) on SIRTF will use four 256 x 256 arrays to provide…
In the near future, wide field surveys will discover 1000's of new strongly lensed quasars, and these will be monitored with unprecedented cadence by the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Many of these will undergo caustic-crossing…
Hard x-ray imaging is indispensable across diverse fields owing to its high penetrability. However, the resolution of traditional x-ray imaging modalities, such as computed tomography (CT) systems, is constrained by factors including beam…
Cosmological information from forthcoming galaxy surveys, such as LSST and Euclid, will soon exceed that available from the CMB. Higher order correlation functions, like the bispectrum, will be indispensable for realising this potential.…
The rapid assembly of the massive black holes that power the luminous quasars observed at $z \sim 6-7$ remains a puzzle. Various direct collapse models have been proposed to head-start black hole growth from initial seeds with masses $\sim…
We study the optical appearance of rotating black holes embedded in dark matter environments using a phenomenological ray tracing framework. Rather than focusing on a single geometry, we compare two effective rotating backgrounds obtained…
We present the novel capabilities of the enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarimetry (eXTP) mission to study the strong gravity region around stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binary systems and supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei.…
In our recent work, we demonstrated that a novel X-ray scaling method, originally introduced for Galactic black holes, could be reliably extended to estimate the mass of supermassive black holes accreting at moderate to high level. Here, we…
For nearly 40 years, dark matter has been widely assumed to be cold and collisionless. Cold dark matter models make fundamental predictions for the behavior of dark matter on small (<10 kpc) scales. These predictions include cuspy density…
This article reviews different microwave technologies used in dark matter axion detection experiments with resonant cavities. The general concepts of the experiment are presented and ways to optimize the design parameters of microwave…
Advances in high angular resolution astronomy make it conceivable that black hole dark matter could be detected via angular deviation effects. Assuming the dark matter in the galaxy is made of solar mass black holes, there is a non-trivial…
We present here a summary of the scientific goals behind the Gravity and Extreme Magnetism SMEX (GEMS) X-ray polarimetry mission's black hole (BH) observing program. The primary targets can be divided into two classes: stellar-mass galactic…
X-ray reflection off the accretion disc surrounding a black hole, together with the associated broad iron K$\alpha$ line, has been widely used to constrain the innermost accretion-flow geometry and black hole spin. Some recent measurements…
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a project to assemble a Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) network of mm wavelength dishes that can resolve strong field General Relativistic signatures near a supermassive black hole. As planned,…
The near-horizon region of a black hole impacts linear (LP) and circular polarization (CP) through strong lensing of photons, adding large-scale symmetries and anti-symmetries to the polarized image. To probe the signature of lensing in…
Many present-day galaxies are known to harbor supermassive, >10^6 Mo, black holes. These central black holes must have grown through accretion from less massive seeds in the early universe. The molecules CO and H2 can be used to trace this…
Hard X-ray and low-energy gamma-ray coded-aperture imaging instruments have been highly successful as high-energy surveyors and transient-source discoverers and trackers over the past decades. Albeit having relatively low sensitivity as…
High-time-resolution X-ray observations of compact objects provide direct access to strong field gravity, black hole masses and spins, and the equation of state of ultra-dense matter. LOFT, the large observatory for X-ray timing, is…
The MAgnetized Disk and Mirror Axion eXperiment (MADMAX) is a future experiment aiming to detect dark matter axions from the galactic halo by resonant conversion to photons in a strong magnetic field. It uses a novel concept based on a…
We study the effects of emission geometry on the capability to constrain black hole parameters from measurements of the shadow and inner-shadow of a Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole. We investigate the capability to constrain mass, charge,…