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Astrophysical Black Holes

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Black Holes: A Laboratory for Testing Strong Gravity

Abstract

The chapter reviews the astrophysical observations of stellar-mass black holes, intermediate mass black holes, supermassive black holes, the observations supporting the idea that these objects are indeed black holes, and the spectral state classification.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    X-ray binaries are binary systems of a compact object (black hole or neutron star) and a stellar companion. The X-ray radiation is mainly generated by gas falling from the companion star (donor) to the compact object (accretor). The gas releases energy as it falls into the gravitational potential of the compact object and X-rays are emitted from the inner part of the accretion disk (see Sect. 4.5 for more details).

  2. 2.

    This number does not include the black holes observed with gravitational waves, but the latter could also be considered “confirmed” stellar-mass black holes because we have robust measurements of their masses from the gravitational wave signal.

  3. 3.

    Flows of gas ejected from the upper atmosphere of a star are quite common. In the case of HMXBs, the wind can be driven by radiation pressure on the resonance absorption lines of heavy elements [21].

  4. 4.

    Systems in which the companion star is very close to the black hole cannot exist, because the strong gravitational field around the compact object would disrupt an ordinary star.

  5. 5.

    Exceptions might be possible: the galaxy A2261-BCG has a very large mass but it might not have any supermassive black hole at its center [87].

  6. 6.

    The Eddington limit is the maximum luminosity for an object and is reached when the pressure of the radiation luminosity balance the gravitational force. See Appendix G for more details.

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  1. Department of Physics, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Cosimo Bambi

  2. Theoretical Astrophysics, Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Cosimo Bambi

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Bambi, C. (2017). Astrophysical Black Holes. In: Black Holes: A Laboratory for Testing Strong Gravity. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4524-0_4

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