Single and binary Black Holes and their active environment

TL;DR

This review discusses recent advances in understanding black hole activity, especially jet emission, galaxy mergers leading to black hole binaries, and the spin-dependent dynamics affecting black hole mergers and their observational signatures.

Contribution

It highlights the role of black hole spins in merger dynamics, jet formation, and gravitational wave signals, integrating observational and theoretical perspectives.

Findings

Electromagnetic emission is largely due to jets, explaining spectral features.

Galaxy mergers lead to binary black holes influencing stellar distributions.

Spin orientation affects angular momentum loss and merger outcomes.

Abstract

In this short review we describe some of the latest endeavours to understand the activity around Black Holes. First, it has been possible to demonstrate that a large part of the electromagnetic emission observed can be interpreted as arising from the jet; this explains at once all spectral features and their variability. Second we dwell on the concept that merging galaxies naturally lead to merging Black Holes. Here we emphasize two aspects: a) the torque exerted by the binary Black Holes carves a torus like distribution out of the stellar population near to the Black Hole binary; b) We consider the last stages of the Black Hole binary merger, taking into account the angle between the spin of the primary Black Hole, and the orbital spin of the second Black Hole. We show that the loss of orbital angular momentum is very strongly spin-dependent; for large angles between the two spins the angular momentum loss is strongly inhibited, allowing spin flip of the primary Black Hole which preserves a high angular momentum relative to the maximum allowed. This ensures that both before and after the merger the accretion disk may reach to very small distances from the central Black Hole, with very high local temperatures right near the base of the jet: This is especially interesting in the case that forming the jet requires the formation of an ADAF like ring near the inner edge of the disk, as suggested by some earlier work. It also may have consequences for the initial hadronic interactions right near the base of the jet. Finally, this may also have important implications for the discovery of gravitational radiation bursts from the merger of black holes; the spin dependence needs to be taken into account.