Abstract
The article summarizes the observational evidence for the existence of massive black holes, as well as the current knowledge about their abundance, their mass and spin distributions, and their cosmic evolution within and together with their galactic hosts.We finish with a discussion of how massive black holes may in the future serve as laboratories for testing the theory of gravitation in the extreme curvature regimes near the event horizon.
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© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
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Genzel, R. (2021). Massive Black Holes: Evidence, Demographics and Cosmic Evolution. In: Duplantier, B., Rivasseau, V. (eds) The Universe. Progress in Mathematical Physics, vol 76. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67392-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67392-5_3
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Publisher Name: Birkhäuser, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-67391-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-67392-5
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