Related papers: Public Release of RELXILL_NK: A Relativistic Refle…
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.…
Despite its success in the weak gravity regime, General Relativity (GR) has yet to be verified in the regime of strong gravity. In this paper, we present the results of detailed ray tracing simulations aiming at clarifying if the combined…
Astrophysical black holes are ideal laboratories for testing Einstein's theory of general relativity in the strong field regime. In this manuscript, we present an analysis of Suzaku and NuSTAR spectra of the black hole binary Cygnus X-1…
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…
In a recent paper [Ghasemi-Nodehi & Bambi, EPJC 76 (2016) 290], we have proposed a new parametrization for testing the Kerr nature of astrophysical black hole candidates. In the present work, we study the possibility of constraining the…
X-ray reflection spectroscopy is a powerful technique for probing the nature of gravity around black holes in the so-called strong field regime. One of the most popular of such probes is to look at theory-agnostic deviations away from the…
The exterior geometry of a neutron star can be approximated by relativistic multipole moments of a parametrized metric using Ernst potential formalism. This spacetime can be tested with electromagnetic wave observation of astrophysical…
In a previous paper, we presented an extension of our reflection model RELXILL_NK to include the finite thickness of the accretion disk following the prescription in Taylor & Reynolds (2018). In this paper, we apply our model to fit the…
We present NKBB, an XSPEC model for the thermal spectrum of thin accretion disks in parametric black hole spacetimes. We employ the Novikov-Thorne model for the description of the accretion disk and the formalism of the transfer function…
General relativity predicts the spacetime metric around an astrophysical black hole to be described by the Kerr solution, which is a massive rotating black hole without any residual charge. In a previous paper, we analyzed the NuSTAR…
It is thought that the spacetime metric around astrophysical black holes is well described by the Kerr solution of Einstein's gravity. However, a robust observational evidence of the Kerr nature of these objects is still lacking. Here we…
Black hole based tests of general relativity have proliferated in recent times with new and improved detectors and telescopes. Modelling of the black hole neighborhood, where most of the radiation carrying strong-field signature originates,…
The X-ray emission of neutron stars and black holes presents a rich phenomenology that can lead us to a better understanding of their nature and to address more general physics questions: Does general relativity apply in the strong gravity…
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…
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…
We present a generally applicable formalism for modeling the emission, absorption, reflection, and reprocessing of radiation by moving plasma streams close to a Kerr Black hole. The formalism can be used to investigate the observational…
Astrophysical black holes are expected to be described by the Kerr metric. This is the only stationary, vacuum, axisymmetric metric, without electromagnetic charge, that satisfies Einstein's equations and does not have pathologies outside…
Considerable attention has recently focused on gravity theories obtained by extending general relativity with additional scalar, vector, or tensor degrees of freedom. In this paper, we show that the black-hole solutions of these theories…
X-ray reflection spectroscopy is a powerful tool to probe the strong gravity region around black holes, but the available relativistic reflection models have a number of simplifications that lead to systematic uncertainties (not fully under…
In the vicinity of black holes, the influence of strong gravity, plasma physics, and emission processes govern the behavior of the system. Since observations such as those carried out by the EHT are not yet able to unambiguously constrain…