High Energy Emission from Galactic Black Hole Systems

Abstract

In the last decade our knowledge on galactic black hole systems and in particular on their high energy behavior has considerably improved. I will briefly review here the main results obtained by the high-energy missions SIGMA/GRANAT, Compton-GRO, Beppo-SAX and Rossi-XTE, on these objects and, in particular, I will discuss the spectral shapes observed at energies higher than 30 keV and the detections of high energy features at > 300 keV. Galactic black holes are indeed main targets for the ESA gamma-ray mission, INTEGRAL, to be launched in October 2002, and for the next gamma-ray missions SWIFT, AGILE and GLAST. We expect that a large amount of data will be collected in the next years and the perspectives for the high energy astrophysics of galactic black hole systems look very promising.