Related papers: Making Black Holes in Supernovae
Black holes with hundreds to thousands of solar masses are more massive than can be formed from a single star in the current universe, yet the best candidates for these objects are not located in gas-rich environments where gradual…
I describe the current state of our knowledge of the mapping between the initial masses of stars and the compact objects -- particularly neutron stars and black holes -- that they produce. Most of that knowledge is theoretical in nature,…
One possible channel for black hole formation is the collapse of a rigidly rotating massive neutron star as it loses its angular momentum or gains excessive mass through accretion. It was proposed that part of the neutron star may form a…
This paper reviews the subject of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) with masses between those of "stellar-mass" and "super-massive" black holes. The existence of IMBHs is a real possibility: they might plausibly have formed as remnants…
How black holes are formed remains an open and fundamental question in Astrophysics. Despite theoretical predictions, it lacks observations to understand whether the black hole formation experiences a supernova explosion. Here we report the…
One of the key open questions in cosmology today pertains to understanding when, where and how super massive black holes form, while it is clear that mergers likely play a significant role in the growth cycles of black holes, how…
Recent high-resolution X-ray imaging studies have discovered possible candidates of intermediate-mass black holes with masses of $M_\bullet \sim 10^{2-4} \MO$ in circumnuclear regions of many (disk) galaxies. It is known that a large number…
Masses of black holes in nearby galactic nuclei can be measured in a variety of ways, using stellar and gaseous kinematics. Reliable black hole masses are known for several dozen objects, so that demographic questions can start to be…
Astronomers have discovered two populations of black holes: (i) stellar-mass black holes with masses in the range 5 to 30 solar masses, millions of which are present in each galaxy in the universe, and (ii) supermassive black holes with…
We study the formation of massive black holes in the first star clusters. We first locate star-forming gas clouds in proto-galactic haloes of $\gtrsim \!10^7\,{\rm M}_{\odot}$ in cosmological hydrodynamics simulations and use them to…
We model the observed black hole mass function under the assumption that black hole formation is controlled by the compactness of the stellar core at the time of collapse. Low compactness stars are more likely to explode as supernovae and…
A longstanding question in stellar evolution is which massive stars produce black holes (BHs) rather than neutron stars (NSs) upon death. It has been common practice to assume that a given zero-age main sequence (ZAMS) mass star (and…
Standard stellar evolution models predict that black holes in the range of approximately $50 - 140 M_\odot$ should not exist directly from stellar evolution. This gap appears because stars with masses between 100 and 240 $M_\odot$ are…
We discuss masses of stellar black holes found in binary systems and errors in their determination. The observed mass distribution has a broad shape within the range $4-16 M_\odot$ without visible concentration to some preferred value. On…
It is firmly established that the stellar mass distribution is smooth, covering the range 0.1-100 Msun. It is to be expected that the masses of the ensuing compact remnants correlate with the masses of their progenitor stars, and thus it is…
There is a lot of current astrophysical evidence and interest in intermediate mass black holes, ranging from a few hundred to several thousand solar masses. The active galaxy M82 and the globular cluster in M31, for example, are known to…
In this small review we present the actual state the knowledge about weighting black holes. Black holes can be found in stellar binary systems in our Galaxy and in other nearby galaxies, in globular clusters, which we can see in our and…
We discuss the method, and potential systematic effects therein, used for measuring the mass of stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries. We restrict our discussion to the method that relies on the validity of Kepler's laws; we refer to…
Recently (Brown \& Bethe 1994) it was suggested that most stars with main sequence mass in the range of about $18 - 30 M_{\odot}$ explode, returning matter to the Galaxy, and then go into low-mass ($\geq 1.5 M_{\odot}$) black holes. Even…
It has been suggested that the supermassive black holes, at the centers of galaxies and quasars, may initially form in single collapses of relativistic star clusters or supermassive stars built-up during the evolution of dense star…