Related papers: RefleX: X-ray absorption and reflection in active …
Obscured AGNs provide an opportunity to study the material surrounding the central engine. Geometric and physical constraints on the absorber can be deduced from the reprocessed AGN emission. In particular, the obscuring gas may reprocess…
Returning radiation is thought to play a key role in disk illumination of black hole X-ray binaries in the high-soft state, yet it has not been fully incorporated into XSPEC reflection models. We present a new table model for reflection…
Relativistic reflection features in the X-ray spectra of black hole binaries and AGNs are thought to be produced through illumination of a cold accretion disk by a hot corona. In this work, we assume that the corona has the shape of an…
Bayesian analysis has begun to be more widely adopted in X-ray spectroscopy, but it has largely been constrained to relatively simple physical models due to limitations in X-ray modelling software and computation time. As a result, Bayesian…
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…
The X-ray spectra of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) often exhibit an excess of emission above the primary power-law at energies <~ $2$ keV. Two models for the origin of this `soft excess' are ionized relativistic reflection from the inner…
We analysed a dedicated NuSTAR observation of the neutron-star low-mass X-ray binary Z-source GX 13+1 to study the timing and spectral properties of the source. From the colour-colour diagram, we conclude that during that observation the…
The central engines of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) are powered by accreting supermassive black holes, and while AGNs are known to play an important role in galaxy evolution, the key physical processes occur on scales that are too small to…
We present a spectral analysis of NuSTAR and NICER observations of the luminous, persistently accreting neutron star (NS) low-mass X-ray binary Cygnus X-2. The data were divided into different branches that the source traces out on the…
X-ray reflection is a very powerful method to assess the spin of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in active galactic nuclei (AGN), yet this technique is not universally accepted. Indeed, complex reprocessing (absorption, scattering) of the…
AGN are known to have complex X-ray spectra that depend on both the properties of the accreting SMBH (e.g. mass, accretion rate) and the distribution of obscuring material in its vicinity ("torus"). Often however, simple and even unphysical…
We present the previously unanalysed high quality XMM-Newton spectrum of an ultraluminous X-ray source candidate in NGC 4517. As with other high quality ULX spectra, a downturn in the spectrum is observed at ~6 keV. Both of the recent disc…
X-ray reverberation in AGN, believed to be the result of the reprocessing of corona photons by the underlying accretion disk, has allowed us to probe the properties of the inner-most regions of the accretion flow and the central black hole.…
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…
Relativistic reflection features are commonly observed in the X-ray spectra of stellar-mass and supermassive black holes and originate from illumination of the inner part of the accretion disk by a hot corona. All the available relativistic…
The X-ray background (XRB) is due to the aggregate of active galactic nuclei (AGN), which peak in activity at z~1 and is often modeled as the sum of different proportions of unabsorbed, moderately- and heavily-absorbed AGN. We present the…
X-ray reflection spectroscopy is a powerful tool to study the strong gravity region of black holes. The next generation of astrophysical X-ray missions promises to provide unprecedented high-quality data, which could permit us to get very…
The nature of the broad-band spectra of supermassive accreting black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is still unknown. The hard X-ray spectra of Seyferts as well as of Galactic stellar-mass black holes (GBHs) are well represented by…
We study reflected X-ray emission that returns to the accretion disc in the strong gravitational fields around black holes using General Relativistic ray tracing and radiative transfer calculations. Reflected X-rays that are produced when…
The nature of ultraluminous X-ray sources in nearby galaxies is one of the major open questions in modern X-ray astrophysics. One possible explanation for these objects is an inhomogeneous, radiation dominated accretion disk around a $\sim…