International School of Cosmic Ray Astrophysics

14^th  Course: "Neutrinos and Explosive Events in the Universe"

A NATO Advanced Study Institute

 2-13 July 2004
Ettore Majorana Centre
Erice, Sicily, Italy

Topic: Black hole physics and the astrophysics of stellar black holes
Lecturer: Jacob Bekenstein

I begin with a summary of general relativity and black hole physics.  Topics include the gravitational redshift, particle trajectories in gravitational fields, Einstein's equations and its Schwarzschild and Kerr solutions, orbits in Schwarzschild geometry and gravitational lensing, dragging of inertial frames and Kerr's solution, gravitational waves.  I continue with a brief review of the astrophysics of stellar scale BHs  including stellar evolution leading to a compact core, evolution of compact object binaries, formation of high mass BHs in low mass binaries, the accretion disk, its modeling and hypercritical accretion.  I follow this with a review of stellar BH astronomy including the X-ray binary systems with known or candidate BHs, estimates of the galactic BH population, techniques of stellar BH masses determination, and X-ray light curves and spectra, the five emission states of BHs in binaries and their interpretations  I also mention diagnostics for the event horizon (iron lines, disk emission from inermost stable orbit, high frequency QPOs), implications of  QPOs for the spins of BHs, and BH recoil and runaway BHs, and the prospects for gravitational waves from BH binaries.

J. E. McClintock and R. A. Remillard, "Black Hole Binaries",   in Compact Stellar   X-ray Sources,  eds. W. H. G. Lewin and M. van der Klis (Cambridge University Press, to appear); astro-ph/0306213