Black Hole Astrophysics
Christopher Reynolds
University of Maryland
chris@astro.umd.edu
Additional authors:
The past decade has witnessed dramatic observational and theoretical advances in our understanding of the astrophysical role and significance of black holes. X-ray spectroscopy and timing measurements have opened the immediate vicinity of the event horizon to observational scrutinity. It is now a question of how, not whether, strong-field relativistic effects are influencing these data. Furthermore, X-ray imaging has revealed the powerful effects that supermassive black holes have on their host galaxies and galaxy clusters, suggesting that they might be important agents in the galaxy formation story. Concurrently, the theory of black hole accretion has advanced to the point that one can construct first-principles, fully relativistic computer simulations of such systems. I shall review these developments and highlight the new challenges and questions that the field is addressing. I shall argue that the next generation of high-energy astrophysics missions, together with the new gravitational wave detectors, will allow us to perform clean and quantitative tests of General Relativity, study the physics of plasma within the ergospheres of black holes, and determine the true role that black holes play in galaxy and large-scale structure formation.
