The Future of Black Hole Astrophysics in the LIGO-VIRGO-LPF Era

Abstract

There is a resurgence of interest in black holes sparked by the LIGO-VIRGO detection of stellar black hole mergers and recent astronomical investigations of jets and accretion disks which probe the spacetime geometry of black holes with masses ranging from a few times the mass of the sun to tens of billions of solar masses. Many of these black holes appear to be spinning rapidly. Some new approaches are described to studying how accreting black holes function as cosmic machines paying special attention to observations of AGN jets, especially with VLBI and $\gamma$-ray telescopes. It is assumed that these jets are powered by the electromagnetic extraction of the spin energy of their associated black holes, which are described by the Kerr metric, and that they become simpler and more electromagnetically dominated as the event horizon is approached. The major uncertainty in these models is in describing acceleration and transport of relativistic electrons and positrons and simple phenomenological prescriptions are proposed. The application of these ideas to M87 and 3C279 is outlined and the prospects for learning more, especially from the Event Horizon Telescope and the Cerenkov Telescope Array, are discussed. The main benefit of a better understanding of black hole astrophysics to the LISA mission should be a firmer understanding of the source demographics.

Talk delivered at LISA Symposium meeting Sep 5-9, 2016, University of Zurich

References in corpus (5)

• Minute-Timescale >100 MeV gamma-ray variability during the giant outburst of quasar 3C 279 observed by Fermi-LAT in 2015 June
• 230 GHz VLBI observations of M87: event-horizon-scale structure at the enhanced very-high-energy $\gamma$-ray state in 2012
• Positron annihilation signatures associated with the outburst of the microquasar V404 Cygni
• Cosmic Ray Origins: An Introduction
• Kinetic study of radiation-reaction-limited particle acceleration during the relaxation of unstable force-free equilibria

Cited by in corpus (5)

• On the Comparison of AGN with GRMHD Simulations: I. Sgr A*
• Positron Effects on Polarized Images and Spectra from Jet and Accretion Flow Models of M87* and Sgr A*
• Determining the Composition of Relativistic Jets from Polarization Maps
• Multiwavelength Observations of Relativistic Jets from General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations
• Hyper-Resistive Model of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Ray Acceleration by Magnetically Collimated Jets Created by Active Galactic Nuclei