Related papers: Evolution of Black Holes in the Galaxy
The predicted rate of binary black hole mergers from galactic fields can vary over several orders of magnitude and is extremely sensitive to the assumptions of stellar evolution. But in dense stellar environments such as globular clusters,…
Rapid formation of supermassive black holes occurs in dense nuclear star clusters that are initially gas-dominated. Stellar-mass black hole remnants of the most massive cluster sink into the core, where a massive runaway black hole forms as…
Models aiming to explain the formation of massive black hole seeds, and in particular the direct collapse scenario, face substantial difficulties. These are rooted in rather ad hoc and fine-tuned initial conditions, such as the simultaneous…
The formation of stellar mass black holes is still very uncertain. Two main uncertainties are the amount of mass ejected in the supernova event (if any) and the magnitude of the natal kick the black hole receives at birth (if any). Repetto…
We explore possible effects of vacuum energy on the evolution of black holes. If the universe contains a cosmological constant, and if black holes can absorb energy from the vacuum, then black hole evaporation could be greatly suppressed.…
We study the classical dynamics of black holes during a nonsingular cosmological bounce. Taking a simple model of a nonsingular bouncing cosmology driven by the combination of a ghost and ordinary scalar field, we use nonlinear evolutions…
The merger of two neutron stars usually produces a remnant with a mass significantly above the single (nonrotating) neutron star maximum mass. In some cases, the remnant will be stabilized against collapse by rapid, differential rotation.…
In this lecture we investigate the formation and evolution of black holes in star clusters. The star clusters under consideration are generally rich, containing more than 10^4 stars, and with a density exceeding 10^4 stars/pc^3. Among these…
Current stellar evolution models predict that during the core collapse of massive stars, a considerable amount of the stellar material will fall back onto the compact, collapsed remnants (neutron stars or black holes), usually in the form…
The population of stellar black holes (SBHs) in the Galaxy and galaxies generally is poorly known in both number and distribution. SBHs are the fossil record of the massive stars in galaxy evolution and may have produced some (if not all)…
We incorporate a model for black hole growth during galaxy mergers into the semi-analytical galaxy formation model based on Lambda-CDM proposed by Baugh et al. (2005). Our black hole model has one free parameter, which we set by matching…
The early Universe was composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, with only trace amounts of heavy elements. It was only after the first generation of star formation that the Universe became sufficiently polluted to produce a second…
Black holes below Chandrasekhar mass limit (1.4 $M_{\odot}$) can not be produced via any standard stellar evolution. Recently, gravitational wave experiments have also discovered unusually low mass black holes whose origin is yet to be…
The next generation of electromagnetic and gravitational wave observatories will open unprecedented windows to the birth of the first supermassive black holes. This has the potential to reveal their origin and growth in the first billion…
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…
Our current understanding of the physical processes of star formation is reviewed, with emphasis on processes occurring in molecular clouds like those observed nearby. The dense cores of these clouds are predicted to undergo gravitational…
Supermassive black hole accretion and star formation appear intimately connected. I review the observational and theoretical evidence for this statement. I then discuss how focussed studies of two systems, our Galactic Center and the…
We investigate whether stellar-mass black holes have to receive natal kicks in order to explain the observed distribution of low-mass X-ray binaries containing black holes within our Galaxy. Such binaries are the product of binary…
The supermassive black holes originally in the nuclei of two merging galaxies will form a binary in the remnant core. The early evolution of the massive binary is driven by dynamical friction before the binary becomes "hard" and eventually…
Be stars are rapidly rotating B type stars. The origin of their rapid rotation is not certain, but binary interaction remains to be a possibility. In this work we investigate the formation of Be stars resulting from mass transfer in…