Related papers: Public Release of RELXILL_NK: A Relativistic Refle…
Most of the X-ray emission from luminous accreting black holes emerges from within 20 gravitational radii. The effective emission radius is several times smaller if the black hole is rapidly spinning. General Relativistic effects can then…
Recently, two of us have found numerically rotating Ellis wormholes as solutions of 4-dimensional Einstein gravity coupled to a phantom field. In this paper, we investigate possible observational signatures to identify similar objects in…
We present GravLensX, an innovative method for rendering black holes with gravitational lensing effects using neural networks. The methodology involves training neural networks to fit the spacetime around black holes and then employing…
Relativistic reflection features in the X-ray spectra of accreting black holes are considered to be generated by the illumination of the accretion disk by the hot corona. In this work, we present a numerical method for the emission line…
The Kerr spacetime is one of the most widely known solutions to Einstein's vacuum field equations and is commonly used to describe a black hole with mass $m$ and spin $a$. Astrophysical observations in the electromagnetic spectrum as well…
The Kerr-Newman metric describes a very special rotating, charged mass and is the most general of the asymptotically flat stationary 'black hole' solutions to the Einstein-Maxwell equations of general relativity. We review the derivation of…
We have calculated the relativistic reflection component of the X-ray spectra of accretion disks in active galactic nuclei (AGN). Our calculations have shown that the spectra can be significantly modified by the motion of the accretion flow…
We report the detection of relativistically broadened iron K alpha emission in the X-ray spectra of AGN detected in the 4Ms CDF-S. Using the Bayesian X-ray analysis (BXA) package, we fit 199 hard band (2-7 keV) selected sources in the…
Bearing in mind the application to the collapsar models of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), we develop a numerical scheme and code for estimating the deposition of energy and momentum due to the neutrino pair annihilation ($\nu + {\bar \nu}…
We extend a recently developed numerical code to obtain stationary, axisymmetric solutions that describe rotating black hole spacetimes in a wide class of modified theories of gravity. The code utilizes a relaxed Newton-Raphson method to…
Weyl conformal symmetry can solve the problem the spacetime singularities present in Einstein's gravity. In a recent paper, two of us have found a singularity-free rotating black hole solution in conformal gravity. In addition to the mass…
Astrophysical black hole candidates are thought to be the Kerr black holes predicted by General Relativity, as these objects cannot be explained otherwise without introducing new physics. However, there is no observational evidence that the…
The continuum-fitting and the iron line methods are currently the two leading techniques for probing the strong gravity region around accreting black holes. In the present work, we test the Kerr black hole hypothesis with the stellar-mass…
In any extension of General Relativity (GR), extra fundamental degrees of freedom couple to gravity. Besides deforming GR forecasts in a theory-dependent way, this coupling generically introduces extra modes in the gravitational-wave…
The iron K$\alpha$ line commonly observed in the X-ray spectrum of both stellar-mass and supermassive black hole candidates is produced by the illumination of a cold accretion disk by a hot corona. In this framework, the activation of a new…
We attempt to study three significant tests of general relativity in higher dimensions both in commutative and non-commutative spaces. In the context of non-commutative geometry, we will consider a solution of the Einstein equation in…
This Thesis describes the basic framework and applications of a relativistic ray-tracing code for analyzing accretion processes around Kerr black holes. We begin in Chapter 1 with a brief historical summary of the major advances in black…
We study strong gravitational lensing in rotating space-times which can be thought of as realistic galactic models in General Relativity. To this end, using the Newman-Janis algorithm, we first obtain a rotating version of a static galactic…
Nearly every galactic core contains a supermassive compact object, hypothesized to be a Kerr black hole. It was only with the advent of Event Horizon Telescope observations that the predictions of this hypothesis could be observationally…
In general relativity without a cosmological constant, a classical theorem due to Hawking states that stationary black holes must be topologically spherical. This result is one of the several ingredients that collectively imply the…