Related papers: Testing general relativity with supermassive black…
The past 10 years have seen tremendous progress in our capability of testing General Relativity in the strong field regime with black hole observations. 10 years ago, the theory of General Relativity was almost completely unexplored in 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…
Relativistic reflection features in the X-ray spectra of black hole binaries and AGNs originate from illumination of the inner part of the accretion disk by a hot corona. In the presence of high quality data and with the correct…
Signatures of X-ray reprocessing (reflection) out of an accretion disk are commonly observed in the high-energy spectrum of accreting black holes, and can be used to probe the strong gravity region around these objects. In this paper, we…
The theory of General Relativity has successfully passed a large number of observational tests. The theory has been extensively tested in the weak-field regime with experiments in the Solar System and observations of binary pulsars. The…
Einstein's theory of General Relativity was proposed over 100 years ago and has successfully passed a large number of observational tests in weak gravitational fields. On the contrary, the strong field regime is still largely unexplored.…
The past 10 years have seen remarkable progress in our capability of analyzing reflection features in the X-ray spectra of accreting black holes. Today X-ray reflection spectroscopy is a mature technique and a powerful tool for studying the…
In the past decade, we have seen an unprecedented progress in our ability of testing general relativity in the strong field regime with black hole observations. Most studies have focused on the so-called tests of the Kerr hypothesis: they…
Submilliarcsecond astrometry and imaging of the black hole Sgr A* at the Galactic Center may become possible in the near future at infrared and submillimetre wavelengths. This resolution is sufficient to observe the silhouette the…
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…
The theory of General Relativity has successfully passed a large number of observational tests. The theory has been extensively tested in the weak-field regime with experiments in the Solar System and observations of binary pulsars.…
We present the first X-ray reflection model for testing the assumption that the metric of astrophysical black holes is described by the Kerr solution. We employ the formalism of the transfer function proposed by Cunningham. The calculations…
Einstein's gravity has undergone extensive tests in the weak field gravitational limit, with results in agreement with theoretical predictions. There exist theories beyond general relativity (GR) which modify gravity in the strong field…
Astrophysical black hole candidates are thought to be the Kerr black holes predicted by General Relativity, but the actual nature of these objects has still to be proven. The Kerr black hole hypothesis can be tested by observing strong…
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…
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…
Einstein's gravity has been extensively tested in the weak field regime, primarily with experiments in the Solar System and observations of binary pulsars, and current data agree well with theoretical predictions. On the other hand, strong…
We present the study of a sample of seven "bare" active galactic nuclei (AGN) observed with Suzaku. We interpret the spectrum of these sources with a relativistic reflection component and we employ our model RELXILL_NK to test the Kerr…
The theory of General Relativity has successfully passed a large number of observational tests. The theory has been extensively tested in the weak-field regime with experiments in the Solar System and observations of binary pulsars. The…
We use the Relativistic Precession Model (RPM) (Stella et al. 1999a) and quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) observations from the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer to derive constraints on the properties of the black holes that power these sources…