Observations of Stellar-Mass Black Holes in the Galaxy

Understand

Stellar-mass black holes (BHs), with masses comparable to stars, are a major constituent of our Milky Way galaxy.

• This chapter describes the landscape of challenging, and long-sought efforts to identify these objects in the Galaxy.
• The first stellar-mass BHs were identified as persistent, but highly variable cosmic X-ray sources.
• Later, transient BH candidates were detected, and now far outnumber the persistent sources.