Related papers: Testing the Kerr Paradigm with X-ray Observations
Since it was theorized by Kerr in 1963, determining the spin of black holes from observed data was paid very little attention until few years back. The main reasons behind this were the unavailability of adequate data and the lack of…
Although General Relativity (GR) has been tested extensively in the weak gravity regime, similar tests in the strong gravity regime are still missing. In this paper we explore the possibility to use X-ray spectropolarimetric observations of…
Stellar-mass black holes offer what is perhaps the best scenario to test theories of gravity in the strong-field regime. In particular, f(R) theories, which have been widely discuss in a cosmological context, can be constrained through…
Accretion disks around black holes radiate a significant fraction of the rest mass of the accreting material in the form of thermal radiation from within a few gravitational radii of the black hole ($ r \lesssim 20 G M / c^{2}$). In…
We consider a temporal response of relativistically broadened line spectrum of iron from black hole accretion irradiated by an X-ray echo under strong gravity. The physical condition of accreting gas is numerically calculated in the context…
Black holes represent outstanding astrophysical laboratories to test the strong gravity regime, since alternative theories of gravity may predict black hole solutions whose may differ distinctly from those of General Relativity. When higher…
General relativity has achieved remarkable experimental and observational success. Critically, recent data from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA, Event Horizon Telescope, and GRAVITY collaborations are often credited with \textit{demonstrating} the…
Observations of the black hole shadow of supermassive black holes, such as Sagittarius A* at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, allow us to study the properties of black holes and the nature of strong-field gravity. According to the Kerr…
Recent X-ray observations of microquasars and Seyfert galaxies reveal broad emission lines in their spectra, which can arise in the innermost parts of accretion disks. Simulations indicate that at low inclination angle the line is measured…
The continuum-fitting method is one of the two most advanced methods of determining the black hole spin in accreting X-ray binary systems. There are, however, still some unresolved issues with the underlying disk models. One of them…
The present paper is a sequel to our previous work [Y. Ni et al., JCAP 1607, 049 (2016)] in which we studied the iron K$\alpha$ line expected in the reflection spectrum of Kerr black holes with scalar hair. These metrics are solutions of…
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.…
The past 10 years have seen tremendous progress in our capability of testing General Relativity in the strong field regime with black hole observations. 10 years ago, the theory of General Relativity was almost completely unexplored in the…
We investigate stationary slim accretion disks around Kerr black holes. We construct a new numerical method based on the relaxation technique. We systematically cover the whole parameter space relevant to stellar mass X-ray binaries. We…
We provide an invariant characterization of the physical properties of the Kerr spacetime. We introduce two dimensionless invariants, constructed out of some known curvature invariants, that act as detectors for the event horizon and…
We present the first X-ray reflection model for testing the assumption that the metric of astrophysical black holes is described by the Kerr solution. We employ the formalism of the transfer function proposed by Cunningham. The calculations…
As a consequence of Birkhoff's theorem, the exterior gravitational field of a spherically symmetric star or black hole is always given by the Schwarzschild metric. In contrast, the exterior gravitational field of a rotating (axisymmetric)…
We discuss three applications of a gauge theory of gravity to rotating astrophysical systems. The theory employs gauge fields in a flat Minkowski background spacetime to describe gravitational interactions. The iron fluorescence line…
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. The…
It has been proposed that the supermassive black hole candidates at the centers of galaxies might be wormholes formed in the early Universe and connecting our Universe with other sister Universes. The analysis of the profile of the…