Stellar-Mass, Intermediate-Mass, and Supermassive Black Holes

Edited by Shin Mineshige and Kazuo Makishima

This volume contains the proceedings of the international workshop ``Stellar-Mass, Intermediate-Mass, and Supermassive Black Holes'' held at Kyoto, Japan, during 28-31 October 2003. This is a collection of presented papers, and is intended as a guide for those who are interested in this field.

Historically, astrophysical black holes were classified into two categories: stellar-mass black holes found mostly in Our Galaxy, and supermassive ones in the center of a certain class of distant galaxies. However, such a classical view has been drastically renewed over the past decade, thanks to the rapid progress in multi-wavelength observations as well as in theory and computation. For example, observations with ASCA, ROSAT, Chandra, and XMM-Newton have revealed that intermediate-mass black holes may exist in nearby galaxies, in the form of bright, compact, off-nuclear X-ray sources called ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs). Narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1s) are another interesting subject, since they seem to represent the lowest-mass end of the overall distribution of supermassive black holes. Further, we have heard about the discovery of black holes in the center of some globular clusters, though still controversial.

Among various aspects of astrophysical black holes under a rapid recent progress, we focus on the following topics:

- Galactic black holes shining at Eddington luminosity

- Nature of ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs)

- Narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies

- Case of the Galactic center

- Black hole variability: multi-wavelength observations vs theory

- Magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) accretion flow and jets

- Possible formation scenarios of the more massive BHs

- Observability of general relativistic effects

- New instrumentation for future black hole research

This volume will be a good reference to those who are starting or are interested in the field of astrophysical black hole, as well as the participants.

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