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The diversity of quasars unified by accretion and orientation
Shen, Yue; Ho, Luis C.
Quasars are rapidly accreting supermassive black holes at the centres of massive galaxies. They display a broad range of properties across all wavelengths, reflecting the diversity in the physical conditions of the regions close to the central engine. These properties, however, are not random, but form well-defined trends. The dominant trend is kn…
A mass of less than 15 solar masses for the black hole in an ultraluminous X-ray source
Motch, C.; Soria, R.; Pakull, M. W. +2 more
Most ultraluminous X-ray sources have a typical set of properties not seen in Galactic stellar-mass black holes. They have luminosities of more than 3 × 1039 ergs per second, unusually soft X-ray components (with a typical temperature of less than about 0.3 kiloelectronvolts) and a characteristic downturn in their spectra above about 5 …
A 400-solar-mass black hole in the galaxy M82
Mushotzky, Richard F.; Pasham, Dheeraj R.; Strohmayer, Tod E.
M82 X-1, the brightest X-ray source in the galaxy M82, has been thought to be an intermediate-mass black hole (100 to 10,000 solar masses) because of its extremely high luminosity and variability characteristics, although some models suggest that its mass may be only about 20 solar masses. The previous mass estimates were based on scaling relation…
Reflection from the strong gravity regime in a lensed quasar at redshift z = 0.658
Miller, J. M.; Reis, R. C.; Walton, D. J. +1 more
The co-evolution of a supermassive black hole with its host galaxy through cosmic time is encoded in its spin. At z > 2, supermassive black holes are thought to grow mostly by merger-driven accretion leading to high spin. It is not known, however, whether below z ~ 1 these black holes continue to grow by coherent accretion or in a chaotic manne…