Black holes and their environments Available to Purchase

Black holes are increasingly taking center stage in modern astrophysics. Accretion onto these objects is an extremely efficient mechanism for extracting energy from mass—in principle, up to 30% of the accreting material's rest-mass energy is accessible. Largely for that reason, black holes have been implicated as the prime mover in many of the universe's most energetic phenomena, including active galactic nuclei, radio galaxies, and gamma-ray bursts. For example, an AGN, that is, an accreting black hole with a mass millions to billions of times greater than the solar mass (M _⊙) and situated at the center of its host galaxy, can have a power of 10⁴⁰ W and outshine its host by a factor of thousands. AGNs and other exotic astrophysical systems provide natural laboratories for testing such fundamental physics as Lorentz invariance and general relativity. More surprising is the recent revelation that black holes seem to...