Black holes

Abstract

Black holes are defined as a region in spacetime where gravity is so strong that particles and electromagnetic radiation cannot escape. According to their mass, they are classified into three types: stellar-mass black holes, intermediate-mass black holes, and supermassive black holes. This entry describes how to weight and detect these three types of black holes, summarizes key research findings such as the universality of black hole accretion and black hole-galaxy co-evolution, and gives an outlook to what the next generation of observational facilities will provide.

10 pages, 5 figures, published entry in Encyclopedia of Astrobiology

References in corpus (13)

• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole
• X-ray Properties of Black-Hole Binaries
• GW190521: A Binary Black Hole Merger with a Total Mass of $150M_{\odot }$
• A Luminous Quasar at Redshift 7.642
• Observational evidence for intermediate-mass black holes
• A 400 solar mass black hole in the Ultraluminous X-ray source M82 X-1 accreting close to its Eddington limit
• Hidden AGN in dwarf galaxies revealed by MaNGA: light echoes, off-nuclear wanderers, and a new broad-line AGN
• The Fundamental Plane of Black Hole Accretion and its Use as a Black Hole-Mass Estimator
• The powerful jet of an off-nuclear intermediate-mass black hole in the spiral galaxy NGC 2276
• Radio jets from AGN in dwarf galaxies in the COSMOS survey: mechanical feedback out to redshift $\sim$3.4
• Populating the low-mass end of the $M_{\mathrm{BH}}-{\sigma }_{\ast }$ relation
• Revealing the intermediate-mass black hole at the heart of the dwarf galaxy NGC 404 with sub-parsec resolution ALMA observations
• The most massive black holes on the Fundamental Plane of Black Hole Accretion