Related papers: Doppler disc tomography applied to low mass AGN sp…
I review the method of Doppler tomography which translates binary-star line profiles taken at a series of orbital phases into a distribution of emission over the binary. I begin with a discussion of the basic principles behind Doppler…
Detecting active black holes in dwarf galaxies has proven to be a challenge due to their small size and weak electromagnetic signatures. Mid-infrared variability has emerged as a promising tool that can be used to detect active low-mass…
Accurately inferring black hole spin is crucial for understanding black hole dynamics and their astrophysical environments. In this work, we outline a geometric method for spin estimation by using the interferometric shape of the first…
We propose a new method for black hole spin measurement. In this method, we consider a gas blob or ring falling onto a black hole from the marginally stable orbit, keeping its initial orbital angular momentum. We calculate the gas motion…
Unlike traditional electromagnetic measurements, gravitational-wave observations are not affected by crowding and extinction. For this reason, compact object binaries orbiting around a massive black hole can be used as probes of the inner…
We investigate the global properties of the radiation emitted by the accretion disk around Kerr black holes. Using the Kerr blackbody (KERRBB) numerical model, we build an analytic approximation of the disk emission features focusing on the…
X-rays produced by compact flares co-rotating with a Keplerian accretion disc are modulated in time by Doppler effects. We improve on previous calculations of these effects by considering recent models of intrinsic X-ray variability, and…
Images from the vicinity of the black hole horizon at the Galactic centre (Sgr A*) could be obtained in the near future with a Very Large Baseline Array of sub-millimetre telescopes. The recently observed short-term infrared and X-ray…
Inner accretion disc around a black hole provides a rare, natural probe to understand the fundamental physics of the strong gravity regime. A possible tilt of such a disc, with respect to the black hole spin equator, is important. This is…
The continuum-fitting method is one of the two most advanced methods of determining the black hole spin in accreting X-ray binary systems. There are, however, still some unresolved issues with the underlying disk models. One of them…
I review the current status of X-ray reflection (a.k.a. broad iron line) based black hole spin measurements. This is a powerful technique that allows us to measure robust black hole spins across the mass range, from the stellar-mass black…
Multiple models have been suggested over the years to explain the structure and support of accretion disks around supermassive black holes, from the standard thin thermal-pressure-dominated $\alpha$-disk model to more recent models that…
Black holes depend only on mass and spin, while what we see from the accretion flow in steady state depends also on mass accretion rate and (weakly) inclination. Hence we should be able to scale the accretion flow properties from the…
If astrophysical black hole candidates are the Kerr black holes predicted by General Relativity, the value of their spin parameter must be subject to the theoretical bound $|a_*| \le 1$. In this work, we consider the possibility that these…
We estimated radiative efficiency, spin and SMBH mass values for sample of 33 distant low luminosity AGNs. The distribution of the estimated spin values (majority of objects have a spin greater than 0.8) is fairly typical for many types of…
Strong gravitational lensing occurs when photons pass through the vicinity of a black hole. We investigate this phenomenon in the context of a gravitational-wave event, specifically when a black hole is settling into its final state. The…
X-ray reverberation mapping has emerged as a powerful probe of microparsec scales around AGN, and with high sensitivity detectors, its full potential in echo-mapping the otherwise inaccessible disk-corona at the black hole horizon scale…
In recent years deep X-ray and infrared surveys have provided an efficient way to find accreting supermassive black holes, otherwise known as active galactic nuclei (AGN), in the young universe. Such surveys can, unlike optical surveys,…
Relativistic reflection features are commonly observed in the X-ray spectra of accreting black holes. In the presence of high quality data and with the correct astrophysical model, X-ray reflection spectroscopy can be quite a powerful tool…
We discuss black hole spin measurements employing the relativistic iron line profiles in the X-ray domain. We investigate the iron line band for two representative sources -- MCG -6-30-15 (active galaxy) and GX 339-4 (X-ray binary). We…