Related papers: Sgr A* and General Relativity
One avenue for testing the no-hair theorem is obtained through timing a pulsar orbiting close to a black hole and fitting for quadrupolar effects on the time-of-arrival of pulses. If deviations from the Kerr quadrupole are measured, then…
The star S0-2, orbiting the Galactic central massive black hole candidate Sgr A*, passed its pericenter in May 2018. This event is the first chance to detect the general relativistic (GR) effect of a massive black hole, free from…
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has revealed the horizon-scale radiation of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), our galaxy's central supermassive black hole, offering a new platform to test gravitational theories. The next step involves studying…
Future observations with next-generation large-area radio telescopes are expected to discover radio pulsars (PSRs) closely orbiting around Sagittarius~A* (Sgr~A*), the supermassive black hole (SMBH) dwelling at our Galactic Center (GC).…
The analysis of the properties of the X-ray radiation emitted from geometrically thin accretion disks around black holes can be a powerful tool to test General Relativity in the strong field regime. This chapter reviews the state-of-the-art…
I report the discovery of a new effect of General Relativity which is important to understand very rapidly rotating (Kerr) black holes. The orbital velocity of a test particle is no longer a monotonic function of the orbit radius when the…
General relativity is one of the pillars of modern physics. For decades, the theory has been mainly tested in the weak field regime with experiments in the Solar System and radio observations of binary pulsars. Until 2015, the strong field…
Timing a pulsar orbiting around Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) can provide us with a unique opportunity of testing gravity theories. We investigate the detectability of a vector charge carried by the Sgr A* black hole (BH) in the bumblebee gravity…
Recent times witnessed a surge of interest in strong gravitational lensing by black holes due to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) results, which suggest comparing the black hole lensing in general relativity and modified gravity theories.…
Binary pulsars allow us to carry out precision tests of gravity and have placed stringent bounds on a broad class of theories beyond general relativity. Current and future radio telescopes, such as FAST, SKA, and MeerKAT, may find a new…
Black holes in General Relativity are famously characterized by two "hairs" only, the mass and the spin of the Kerr spacetime. Theories extending General Relativity, however, allow in principle for additional black hole charges, which will…
The massive black hole at the Galactic center Sgr A* is surrounded by a cluster of stars orbiting around it. Light from these stars is bent by the gravitational field of the black hole, giving rise to several phenomena: astrometric…
General Relativity allows for a unique black hole solution, characterized by its mass M, angular momentum J, and electric charge Q. Black holes in General Relativity are thus said to have no hair, that is, no other independent physical…
Capturing the image of the shadow cast by the event horizon of an illuminated black hole is, at the most basic level, an experiment of extreme light deflection in a strongly curved spacetime. As such, the properties of an imaged shadow can…
The no-hair theorem can be tested in the strong gravity regime by using the top-bottom approach and the bottom-top approach. The non-Kerr spacetime of the later approach is an ideal framework to do the tests in the region very close to the…
Recent gravitational wave observations of binary black hole mergers and a binary neutron star merger by LIGO and Virgo Collaborations associated with its optical counterpart constrain deviation from General Relativity (GR) both on…
In this contribution, we summarize our results concerning the observational constraints on the electric charge associated with the Galactic centre black hole - Sgr A*. According to the no-hair theorem, every astrophysical black hole,…
In this paper, we review our current efforts to test General Relativity in the strong field regime by studying the reflection spectrum of supermassive black holes. So far we have analyzed 11 sources with observations of NuSTAR, Suzaku,…
Recent observational data from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration provide convincing realistic evidence for the existence of black hole rotation. From a phenomenological perspective, a recently proposed stable rotating regular…
Einstein's theory of general relativity has been extensively tested in weak gravitational fields, mainly with experiments in the Solar System and observations of radio pulsars, and current data agree well with the theoretical predictions.…