Related papers: OJ 287: New Testing Ground for General Relativity …

The timing of millisecond pulsars has long been used as an exquisitely precise tool for testing the building blocks of general relativity, including the strong equivalence principle and Lorentz symmetry. Observations of binary systems…

New Massive Gravity is an alternative theory to General Relativity that is used to describe the gravitational field in a (2+1)-dimensional spacetime. Black hole solutions have been found in this theory, in particular an asymptotically…

Before the 1970s, precision tests for gravity theories were constrained to the weak gravitational fields of the Solar system. Hence, only the weak-field slow-motion aspects of relativistic celestial mechanics could be investigated. Testing…

Direct detections of gravitational waves offer a unique opportunity to test gravity in the highly dynamical and strong field regime. Current tests are typically performed assuming signals from quasicircular binaries. However, the complex…

(abridged) We report the results of a 10-year timing campaign on PSR J1738+0333, a 5.85-ms pulsar in a low-eccentricity 8.5-hour orbit with a low-mass white dwarf companion (...) The measurements of proper motion and parallax allow for a…

With n-body simulations and analytic approximations we study the dynamics and stability of low eccentricity misaligned test particles around binary systems with varying mass fraction and eccentricity. General relativity (GR) plays a primary…

Our Galactic Center, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is believed to harbour a supermassive black hole (BH), as suggested by observations tracking individual orbiting stars. Upcoming sub-millimetre very-long-baseline-interferometry (VLBI) images of…

Gravitational wave (GW) observations of binary black hole (BBH) coalescences provide a unique opportunity to test general relativity (GR) in the strong-field regime. To ensure the reliability of these tests, it is essential to identify and…

Successful observations of the seven predicted bremsstrahlung flares from the unique bright blazar OJ 287 firmly point to the presence of a nanohertz gravitational wave (GW) emitting supermassive black hole (SMBH) binary central engine. We…

The theory of General Relativity has successfully passed a large number of observational tests. The theory has been extensively tested in the weak-field regime with experiments in the Solar System and observations of binary pulsars.…

We revisit the precessing black hole binary model, a candidate to explain the bizarre quasi-periodic optical flares in OJ-287's light curve, from first principles. We deviate from existing work in three significant ways: 1) Including…

Light curves for more than century optical photometric observations of the blazar OJ 287 reveals strong flares with a quasi-period of about 12 years. For a long time, this period has been interpreted by processes in a binary black hole…

Quasi-Periodic Oscillations (QPOs) observed in the X-ray flux emitted by accreting black holes, are associated to phenomena occurring near the horizon. Future very large area X-ray instruments will be able to measure QPO frequencies with…

Gravitational wave observations will probe non-linear gravitational interactions and thus enable strong tests of Einstein's theory of general relativity. We present a numerical relativity study of the late inspiral and merger of binary…

Black holes are among the most extreme objects that can be found in the Universe and an ideal laboratory for testing fundamental physics. This article will briefly review the basic properties of black holes as expected from general…

The close limit approximation of binary black hole is a powerful method to study gravitational-wave emission from highly non-linear geometries. In this work, we use it as a tool to model black hole spacetimes in theories of gravity with a…

The direct detection of gravitational waves (GW) from merging binary black holes and neutron stars mark the beginning of a new era in gravitational physics, and it brings forth new opportunities to test theories of gravity. To this end, it…

General Relativity effects (gravitational redshift, light bending, ...) strongly modify the characteristics of the lines emitted close to the Black Hole in Active Galactic Nuclei and Galactic Black Hole systems. These effects are reviewed…

General Relativity has had tremendous successes on both theoretical and experimental fronts for over a century by now. However, the theory contents are far from being exhausted. Only very recently, with gravitational wave detection from…

Electromagnetic observations have been used over the past decades to understand the nature of black holes and the material around them. Our ability to learn about the fundamental physics relies on our understanding of two key ingredients in…