Black holes in astrophysics

By Ramesh Narayan. 2005

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reviews the current status of black hole (BH) astrophysics, focusing on topics of interest to a physics audience. Astronomers have discovered dozens of compact objects with masses greater than 3M⊙, the likely maximum mass of a neutron star. These objects are identified as BH candidates. Some of the candidates have masses ∼5M⊙–20M⊙ and are found in x-ray binaries, while the rest have masses ∼106M⊙–109.5M⊙ and are found in galactic nuclei. A variety of methods are being tried to estimate the spin parameters of the candidate BHs. There is strong circumstantial evidence that many of the objects have event horizons, so there is good reason to believe that the candidates are true BHs. Recent MHD simulations of magnetized plasma accreting on rotating BHs seem to hint that relativistic jets may be produced by a magnetic analogue of the Penrose process.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a30145045e27de82ea6c8254c23ac3165b3f9f4c

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Citations in the corpus

Black Hole Parameter Estimation from Its Shadow (2018, methodology): “The dynamical mass measurements from X-ray binaries only provide lower limits of the black hole’s mass (Häring & Rix 2004; Narayan 2005; Casares & Jonker 2014).”
A 3+1 perspective on null hypersurfaces and isolated horizons (2005, background): “Numerous observations of black holes in X-ray binaries and in the center of most galaxies, including ours, have firmly established black holes as ‘standard’ objects in the astronomical field [121,142,126].”
Cosmological Black Hole Spin Evolution by Mergers and Accretion (2008, background): “…an almost-linear relation between the BH mass and the mass of the galactic bulge hosting the BH. Spin measurements are generally more uncertain (Narayan 2005; Miller 2007), and the cosmological coevolution of BH masses and spins is a significant open problem in our understanding of quasars and…”
Black hole boundaries (2005, background): “They have also found a key place in gravit ational astrophysics and the observational evidence for their existence is very strong and getting bett er all the time [6].”
Constraining the spin and the deformation parameters from the black hole shadow (2014, background): “Astrophysical BH candidates are stellar-mass compact objects in X-ray binary systems and super-massive bodies at the center of every normal galaxy [4].”
Superradiance (2015, unknown): “[705]).”
Testing black hole candidates with electromagnetic radiation (2015, background): “Astronomical observations have discovered a number of “BH candidates” (Narayan, 2005).”
Phenomenological aspects of black holes beyond general relativity (2018, background): “[2] Ramesh Narayan, “Black holes in astrophysics,” New J.”
TESTING THE NO-HAIR THEOREM WITH EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE OBSERVATIONS OF SAGITTARIUS A* (2013, background): “As such, a tremendous effort continues to be expended studying the nature of these astrophysical interactions (Narayan 2005; Vietri 2008; Meier 2012).”
Wormholes as black hole foils (2007, background): “For a review of the astronomical evidence for black holes see [3].”