Stellar black hole mass function: determination and possible implications for fundamental gravity

Abstract

We discuss masses of stellar black holes found in binary systems and errors in their determination. The observed mass distribution has a broad shape within the range $4-16 M_\odot$ without visible concentration to some preferred value. On the other hand, the black hole mass funciton as inferred from observations of luminous X-ray sources in other galaxies exhibits a power-law form. We show that both dynamically obtained black hole mass function and derived from X-ray observations can be made consistent in the frame of the hypothesis of enhanced black hole evaporation on a RSII brane for reasonable values of the warp-factor of the Anti-de-Sitter bulk space.