I -Love- Q relations: from compact stars to black holes

Black holes: from stars to galaxies

While until recently they were often considered as exotic objects of dubious existence, in the last decades there have been overwhelming observational evidences for the presence of stellar mass black holes in binary systems, supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, and possibly, intermediate-mass black holes observed as ultraluminous X-ray sources in nearby galaxies. Black holes are...

General Relativity and Compact Objects – Neutron Stars and Black Holes

Neutron stars and black holes

Like white dwarfs, neutron stars are strongly degenerate compact objects of roughly one solar mass. But whereas white dwarfs are supported against gravity by the zero-point motion of electrons (electron degeneracy pressure), neutron stars, as the name suggests, consist mostly of neutrons and are supported by the zero-point motion and interactions among the latter particles. The existence of neu...

Gravitational Waves from Perturbed Black Holes and Relativistic Stars

These lectures aim at providing an introduction to the properties of gravitational waves and in particular to those gravitational waves that are expected as a consequence of perturbations of black holes and neutron stars. Imprinted in the gravitational radiation emitted by these objects is, in fact, a wealth of physical information. In the case of black holes, a detailed knowledge of the gravit...

Modeling feedback from stars and black holes in galaxy mergers

We describe techniques for incorporating feedback from star formation and black hole accretion into simulations of isolated and merging galaxies. At present, the details of these processes cannot be resolved in simulations on galactic scales. Our basic approach therefore involves forming coarse-grained representations of the properties of the interstellar medium and black hole accretion startin...