ABSTRACT

Galactic black holes represent a remarkable, local opportunity to study how black holes accrete, how they influence their host environments through radiative and mechanical feedback, and to explore gravitation in the strong-field limit. Observations with Chandra and explorer-class missions, as well as ground-based facilities, have significantly improved our understanding of basic accretion disk physics, relativistic jet production, and have given rise to a number of black hole spin constraints. In this talk, I will review a selection of important recent results and their impacts, and make connections to accretion onto supermassive black holes and young stars.