The growth of supermassive black holes by merging and accretion in hierarchical models of galaxy formation is studied by means of Monte Carlo simulations. A tight linear relation between masses of black holes and masses of bulges arises if the mass accreted by supermassive black holes scales linearly with the mass forming stars and if the redshift evolution of mass accretion tracks closely that...

We present the results of a NuSTAR study of the dynamically confirmed stellar-mass black hole GS 1354−645. The source was observed during its 2015 “hard” state outburst; we concentrate on spectra from two relatively bright phases. In the higher-flux observation, the broadband NuSTAR spectra reveal a clear, strong disk reflection spectrum, blurred by a degree that requires a black hole spin of a...

Neutron stars inspiralling into a stellar envelope can accrete at rates vastly exceeding the Eddington limit if the flow develops pressures high enough to allow neutrinos to radiate the released gravitational energy. It has been suggested that this hypercritical mode of accretion leads inevitably to the formation of stellar mass black holes during common envelope evolution. We study the hydrody...

We have analyzed archival ASCA data on the soft X-ray transient source V404 Cyg in quiescence. We find that in the energy range 0.7 to 8.5 keV the spectrum is a hard power-law with a photon spectral index between 1.8 and 2.6 (90% confidence limits). We present a model of V404 Cyg in which the accretion flow has two components: (1) an outer thin disk with a small annular extent, and (2) a large ...

This is the first in a series of papers that investigate the properties of accretion flows in the Kerr metric through three-dimensional, general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of tori with a near-Keplerian initial angular velocity profile. We study four models with increasing black hole spin, from a/M = 0 to 0.998, for which the structural parameters of the initial tori are mainta...