Related papers: Galactic Black Hole Binaries: Multifrequency Conne…
A solid theoretical understanding of how inflowing, accreting plasma around black holes and other compact objects gives rise to outflowing winds and jets is still lacking, despite decades of observations. The fact that similar processes and…
Polarimetry provides key physical information on the properties of interacting binary systems, sometimes difficult to obtain by any other type of observation. Indeed, radiation processes such as scattering by free electrons in the hot…
The recent detections of gravitational waves from binary systems of black holes are in remarkable agreement with the predictions of General Relativity. In this pedagogical mini-review, I will go through the physics of the different phases…
The inner 20 gravitational radii around the black hole at the centre of luminous Active Galactic Nuclei and stellar mass Black Hole Binaries are now being routinely mapped by X-ray spectral-timing techniques. Spectral blurring and…
I review observations of the X-ray spectra of Galactic Black Hole Candidates, and theoretical ideas as to how these can be produced. X-ray reflection should enable different source geometries to be distinguished, but the ionisation…
The X-ray signal from active galactic nuclei and black hole X-ray binaries is highly variable on a range of timescales. This variability can be exploited to map the region of interest close to the black hole, which is far too small to…
Unlike traditional electromagnetic measurements, gravitational-wave observations are not affected by crowding and extinction. For this reason, compact object binaries orbiting around a massive black hole can be used as probes of the inner…
The X-ray emission from accreting black-holes and neutron stars features strong variability on sub-second time scales, with very complex and broad phenomenology. From high-frequency quasi-periodic oscillations to rapidly changing X-ray…
Discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO team (Abbott et al. 2016) bring a new era for observation of black hole systems. These new observations will improve our knowledge on black holes and gravitational physics. In this study, we present…
Relativistic reflection features are commonly observed in the X-ray spectra of accreting black holes. In the presence of high quality data and with the correct astrophysical model, X-ray reflection spectroscopy can be quite a powerful tool…
Black hole X-ray binaries (BHXBs) show rich phenomenology in the spectral and timing properties. We collected the spectral data of 20 BHXBs from the literature across different spectral states. The spectral properties are studied in the…
Isolated black holes in our Galaxy have eluded detection so far. We present here a comprehensive study on the detectability of isolated stellar-mass astrophysical black holes that accrete interstellar gas from molecular clouds in both the…
Gravitational wave observations of eccentric binary black hole mergers will provide unequivocal evidence for the formation of these systems through dynamical assembly in dense stellar environments. The study of these astrophysically…
Thanks to extensive observations with X-ray missions and facilities working in other wavelengths, as well as rapidly--advancing numerical simulations of accretion flows, our knowledge of astrophysical black holes has been remarkably…
Blurred reflection features are commonly observed in the X-ray spectra of accreting black holes. In the presence of high-quality data and with the correct astrophysical model, X-ray reflection spectroscopy is a powerful tool to probe the…
In this short review we describe some of the latest endeavours to understand the activity around Black Holes. First, it has been possible to demonstrate that a large part of the electromagnetic emission observed can be interpreted as…
Pulsar timing is a promising technique for detecting low frequency sources of gravitational waves. Historically the focus has been on the detection of diffuse stochastic backgrounds, such as those formed from the superposition of weak…
The extreme conditions found near black holes and neutron stars provide a unique opportunity for testing physical theories. Observations of both types of compact objects can be used to probe regions of strong gravity, allowing for tests of…
General relativity is one of the pillars of modern physics. For decades, the theory has been mainly tested in the weak field regime with experiments in the Solar System and radio observations of binary pulsars. Until 2015, the strong field…
We systematically analyzed about a terabyte of data from Galactic binary systems to characterize how these spectra change as a function of mass accretion rate. With this volume of data we are able to identify the differences in behaviour of…