Related papers: Probing General Relativity with Accreting Black Ho…
Long X-ray observations of bright Active Galactic Nuclei show that X-ray eclipses, with durations from a few hours to a few days, are rather common. This opens up a new window of opportunity in the search for signatures of relativistic…
Starting with the conceptual foundation of general relativity (GR) - equivalence principle, space-time geometry and special relativity, I train cross hairs on two characteristic predictions of GR - black holes and gravitational waves. These…
X-rays are emitted from the corona above the orbiting matter of the accretion disk and travel either directly to us or illuminate the disk. This illumination of the inner disk is enhanced by gravitational light bending, which focuses the…
The observation of energetic X-ray emission from black holes, inconsistent with thermal emission from an accretion disk, has long indicated the presence of a "corona" around these objects. However, our knowledge of the geometry,…
Observations of jets in X-ray binaries show a correlation between radio power and black hole spin. This correlation, if confirmed, points towards the idea that relativistic jets may be powered by the rotational energy of black holes. In…
Any cold, optically-thick matter in the vicinity of an accreting black hole, such as the accretion disk, can intercept and reprocess some fraction of the hard X-ray continuum emission, thereby imprinting atomic features into the observed…
Accretion disks around stellar-mass black holes (BHs) emit radiation peaking in the soft X-rays when the source is in the thermal state. The emerging photons are polarized and, for symmetry reasons, the polarization integrated over the…
In many active galaxies, the X-ray reflection features from the innermost regions of the accretion disc are relativistically distorted. This distortion allows us to measure parameters of the black hole such as its spin. The ratio in flux…
We prescribe a method to study the effects of self-gravity of accretion disk around a black hole associated with long Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) in an evolving background Kerr metric. This is an extension to our previous work where we…
The X-ray emission from accreting black hole (BH) systems displays strong variability. Short reverberation lags are expected between the primary hard X-ray continuum and the reprocessed disc emission. These lags depend on light-travel…
The total energy emitted by the growth of massive black holes is large and can be 10-50 per cent of that emitted by stars in the universe. I show how the X-ray Background provides a good measure of this energy and also why most accretion…
Recent studies have indicated that the emission of gravitational waves at the merger of two black holes gives a kick to the final black hole. If the supermassive black hole at the center of a disk galaxy is kicked but the velocity is not…
The past 10 years have seen remarkable progress in our capability of analyzing reflection features in the X-ray spectra of accreting black holes. Today X-ray reflection spectroscopy is a mature technique and a powerful tool for studying the…
Over the last decades X-ray spectroscopy has proven to be a powerful tool for the estimation of black hole spin and several other key parameters in dozens of AGN and black hole X-ray binaries. In this White Paper, we discuss the…
Gravitational waves from the coalescence of binary black holes carry away linear momentum, causing center of mass recoil. This "radiation rocket" effect has important implications for systems with escape speeds of order the recoil velocity.…
Light bending due to strong gravity has recently been invoked to explain variability and flux correlations between different bands in some accreting black holes. A characteristic feature of light bending is reflection-dominated spectra,…
X-ray reverberation echoes are assumed to be produced in the strongly distorted spacetime around accreting supermassive black holes. This signal allows us to spatially map the geometry of the inner accretion flow - a region which cannot yet…
Most of the luminosity of accreting black hole is emitted in the X-ray band. This radiation is believed to emerge, through inverse Compton process, from a hot (Te ~ 10^8 -10^9 K) optically thin (Thomson optical depth ~ 1) plasma probably…
We use the integrated spectrum of the X-ray background and quasars Spectral Energy Distribution to derive the contribution of quasars to the energy output of the Universe. We find a lower limit for the energy from accretion onto black holes…
At luminosities below a few percent of Eddington, accreting black holes switch to a hard spectral state which is very different from the soft blackbody-like spectral state that is found at higher luminosities. The hard state is…