Black Holes in Astrophysics

Abstract

This article reviews the current status of black hole astrophysics, focusing on topics of interest to a physics audience. Astronomers have discovered dozens of compact objects with masses greater than 3 solar masses, the likely maximum mass of a neutron star. These objects are identified as black hole candidates. Some of the candidates have masses of 5 to 20 solar masses and are found in X-ray binaries, while the rest have masses from a million to a billion solar masses and are found in galactic nuclei. A variety of methods are being tried to estimate the spin parameters of the candidate black holes. There is strong circumstantial evidence that many of the objects have event horizons. Recent MHD simulations of magnetized plasma accreting on rotating black holes seem to hint that relativistic jets may be produced by a magnetic analog of the Penrose process.Comment: To appear in a forthcoming Special Focus Issue on "Spacetime 100 Years Later" published by the New Journal of Physics (http://www.iop.org/EJ/njp) The article, finalized in October, 2004, consists of 21 pages of text, 3 figures and 6 movies (found at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~narayan/NJP