Ramesh Narayan, Harvard University 
February 4, 2014

Astrophysicists have discovered two populations of black holes in the universe: stellar-mass black holes with masses in the range 5 to 20 solar masses, and supermassive black holes with masses in the range million to several billion solar masses. According to the general theory of relativity, each black hole is completely described with just two parameters: its mass and its spin. Measuring these two parameters for individual black holes and relating the measured values to specific observational manifestations of the holes is a major area of research. The talk will review some recent progress in this field.

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