In this paper, we review our current efforts to test General Relativity in the strong field regime by studying the reflection spectrum of supermassive black holes. So far we have analyzed 11 sources with observations of NuSTAR, Suzaku, Swift, and XMM-Newton. Our results are consistent with general relativity, according to which the spacetime metric around astrophysical black holes should be well approximated by the Kerr solution. We discuss the systematic uncertainties in our model and we present a preliminary study on the impact of some of them on the measurement of the spacetime metric.
@article{arxiv.1905.08012,
title = {Testing general relativity with supermassive black holes using X-ray reflection spectroscopy},
author = {Askar B. Abdikamalov and Dimitry Ayzenberg and Cosimo Bambi and Sourabh Nampalliwar and Ashutosh Tripathi and Jelen Wong and Yerong Xu and Jinli Yan and Yunfeng Yan and Yuchan Yang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.08012},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
22 pages, 12 figures. Review article prepared for a Special Issue of Universe and based on some talks given at the meeting "Recent Progress in Relativistic Astrophysics" (6-8 May 2019, Shanghai, China)