Massive and supermassive black holes in the contemporary and early universe and the new problems of cosmology and astrophysics

Abstract: This is the translation into English of the introduction, conclusion, and the list of references of the review on massive primordial black holes, which is submitted in Russian to Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk (Physics-Uspekhi). If accepted, this review is translated into English by the Journal and published in Russian and a little later in English. The review concerns the recent astronomical data which show that massive primordial black holes play much more significant role in the universe than it was previously believed. This is true both for the the contemporary and the early universe at the red-shifts about 10. The mechanism, proposed in 1993, of primordial creation of heavy and superheavy black holes in the very early universe is discussed. This mechanism predicts the log-normal mass spectrum of the primordial black holes, which became very popular during the last couple of years. The proposed mechanism presents a natural explanation of a large amount of the recent observational data, which do not fit the standard cosmology and astrophysics.