English

Testing the Kerr nature of black hole candidates using iron line reverberation mapping in the CPR framework

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2016-06-17 v2 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

The iron Kα\alpha line commonly observed in the X-ray spectrum of black hole candidates is produced by X-ray fluorescence of the inner accretion disk. This line can potentially be quite a powerful tool to probe the spacetime geometry around these objects and test the Kerr black hole hypothesis. In a previous paper, we studied the ability to constrain possible deviations from the Kerr solution from the standard time-integrated iron line spectrum within the Cardoso-Pani-Rico framework. In the present work, we expand on that study and consider iron line reverberation mapping in the CPR framework. That is, we consider the time-evolution of the iron line profile in response to fluctuations in the X-ray primary source. Our simulations clearly show that the time information in reverberation mapping can better constrain the background metric than the time-integrated approach, and this is true, notably, for the deformation parameter ϵ3r\epsilon^r_3, which is only weakly informed by a time-integrated observation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1601.00838,
  title  = {Testing the Kerr nature of black hole candidates using iron line reverberation mapping in the CPR framework},
  author = {Jiachen Jiang and Cosimo Bambi and James F. Steiner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.00838},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

10 pages, 6 figures. v2: refereed version