Related papers: Public Release of RELXILL_NK: A Relativistic Refle…
Recently, two of us have studied iron line reverberation mapping to test black hole candidates, showing that the time information in reverberation mapping can better constrain the Kerr metric than the time-integrated approach. Motivated by…
Einstein-Maxwell dilaton-axion gravity is a string-inspired model arising from the low energy effective action of heterotic string theory and an important candidate as alternative to General Relativity. Recently, some authors have explored…
Astrophysical tests of general relativity belong to two categories: 1) "internal", i.e. consistency tests within the theory (for example, tests that astrophysical black holes are indeed described by the Kerr solution and its perturbations),…
Our Galactic Center, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is believed to harbour a supermassive black hole (BH), as suggested by observations tracking individual orbiting stars. Upcoming sub-millimetre very-long-baseline-interferometry (VLBI) images of…
Einstein's theory of General Relativity implies that energy, i.e. matter, curves space-time and thus deforms lightlike geodesics, giving rise to gravitational lensing. This phenomenon is well understood in the case of the Schwarzschild…
Observations of the continuum spectrum emitted by accretion disks around black holes allows us to infer their properties, including possibly whether black holes are described by the Kerr metric. Some modified gravity theories do not admit…
The axial and polar modes for the ring down of a Schwarzschild black hole are calculated, by first deriving the Regge-Wheeler and Zerilli equations, respectively, and finally applying the Asymptotic Iteration Method (AIM). We were able to…
The Kerr spacetime is a fundamental solution of general relativity (GR), describing the gravitational field around a rotating, uncharged black hole (BH). Kerr spacetime has been crucial in modern astrophysics and it serves as a foundation…
We study the lamppost model, in which the X-ray source in accreting black-hole systems is located on the rotation axis close to the horizon. We point out a number of inconsistencies in the widely used lamppost model relxilllp, e.g., the…
Astrophysical black holes (BHs) are universally expected to be described by the Kerr metric, a stationary, vacuum solution of general relativity (GR). Indeed, by imaging M87$^\star$ and Sgr A$^\star$ and measuring the size of their shadows,…
The development of techniques to measure accurately black hole spins is crucial to study the physics and astrophysics of these objects. X-ray reflection spectroscopy is currently the most popular method to estimate the spins of accreting…
We study the iron line shape expected in the reflection spectrum of accretion disks around black holes in asymptotically safe gravity. We compare the results of our simulations with the iron line shapes expected in the reflection spectrum…
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…
The exact solution for the motion of a test particle in a non-spherical polar orbit around a Kerr black hole is derived. Exact novel expressions for frame dragging (Lense-Thirring effect), periapsis advance and the orbital period are…
General relativity has passed all solar system experiments and neutron star based tests, such as binary pulsar observations, with flying colors. A more exotic arena for testing general relativity is in systems that contain one or more black…
General relativistic ray tracing simulations of the time-averaged spectrum and energy-dependent time delays in AGN are presented. We model the lamp-post geometry in which the accreting gas is illuminated by an X-ray source located on the…
Collaborative international efforts under the name of the Event Horizon Telescope project, using sub- mm very long baseline interferometry, are soon expected to provide the first images of the shadow cast by the candidate supermassive black…
The primary X-ray emission from AGN, described by a power law, irradiates the accretion disc producing reflection features in the spectrum. The reflection features arising from the inner regions of the disc can be significantly modified by…
Following previous work of ours in spherical symmetry, we here propose a new parametric framework to describe the spacetime of axisymmetric black holes in generic metric theories of gravity. In this case, the metric components are functions…
We present a relativistic model for the stationary axisymmetric accretion flow of a rotating cloud of non-interacting particles falling onto a Kerr black hole. Based on a ballistic approximation, streamlines are described analytically in…