Related papers: Public Release of RELXILL_NK: A Relativistic Refle…
X-ray reflection from an accretion disc produces characteristic emission lines allowing us to probe the innermost regions in AGN. We investigate these emission lines under a framework of Riemannian geometrical optics where the corona has a…
Optical analogues to black holes allow the investigation of general relativity in a laboratory setting. Previous works have considered analogues to Schwarzschild black holes in an isotropic coordinate system; the major drawback is that…
We present a numerical work aiming at the computation of excised initial data for black hole spacetimes in full general relativity, using Dirac gauge in the context of a constrained formalism for the Einstein equations. Introducing the…
Astrophysical black hole candidates are thought to be the Kerr black holes predicted by General Relativity, but there is not yet clear evidence that the geometry of the space-time around these objects is really described by the Kerr metric.…
We study some general properties of two black hole solutions in Einstein's conformal gravity. Both solutions can be obtained from the Kerr metric with a suitable conformal rescaling, which leads, respectively, to a regular and a singular…
Ray tracing radiative transfer is a powerful method for comparing theoretical models of black hole accretion flows and jets with observations. We present a public code, grtrans, for carrying out such calculations in the Kerr metric,…
Gravitational lensing is a well known phenomenon predicted by the General Theory of Relativity. It is now a well-developed observational technique in astronomy and is considered to be a fundamental tool for acquiring information about the…
The strong gravitational field near massive blackhole is an interesting regime to test General Relativity(GR) and modified gravity theories. The knowledge of spacetime metric around a blackhole is a primary step for such tests. Solving…
One crucial problem in relativistic astrophysics is that of the nature of black hole candidates. It is usually assumed that astrophysical black holes are described by the Schwarzschild or Kerr space-times; however, there is no direct…
These notes, based on lectures given at the summer school on Asymptotic Analysis in General Relativity, collect material on the Einstein equations, the geometry of black hole spacetimes, and the analysis of fields on black hole backgrounds.…
This is a collection of notes to calculate electromagnetic spectra of geometrically thin and optically thick accretion disks around black holes. The presentation is intentionally pedagogical and most calculations are reported step by step.…
General relativity's prediction that all black holes are described by the Kerr metric, irrespective of their size, can now be empirically tested using electromagnetic observations of supermassive black holes and gravitational waves from…
We review the developments in modeling gravitational recoil from merging black-hole binaries and introduce a new set of 20 simulations to test our previously proposed empirical formula for the recoil. The configurations are chosen to…
We present briefly the first results obtained by the application of the KYNREFREV-reverberation model, which is ready for its use in XSPEC. This model computes the time dependent reflection spectra of the disc as a response to a flash of…
In this paper we study the strong gravitational lensing scenario where the lens is a Reissner-Nordstrom black hole. We obtain the basic equations and show that, as in the case of Schwarzschild black hole, besides the primary and secondary…
The illumination pattern (or emissivity profile) of the accretion disc due to the reflection of X-rays in AGN can be understood in terms of relativistic effects on the rays propagating from a source in a corona surrounding the central black…
We study gravitational lensing by a recently proposed black hole solution in Loop Quantum Gravity. We highlight the fact that the quantum gravity corrections to the Schwarzschild metric in this model evade the `mass suppression' effects…
X-ray reflection spectroscopy can be a powerful tool to test the nature of astrophysical black holes. Extending previous work on Kerr black holes with scalar hair [1] and on boson stars [2], here we study whether astrophysical black hole…
Future electromagnetic observations of black holes may allow us to test General Relativity in the strong-field regime. Such tests, however, require knowledge of rotating black hole solutions in modified gravity theories, a class of which…
In a previous paper, one of us calculated iron K$\alpha$ line profiles emitted from possible accretion disks around traversable wormholes as a first step to use X-ray reflection spectroscopy to search for astrophysical wormholes in active…