Related papers: Venturing beyond the ISCO: Detecting X-ray emissio…
Accretion around black holes is very often characterized by distinctive X-ray reflection features (mostly, iron inner-shell transitions), which arise due to the primary radiation being reprocessed by a dense and relatively colder medium,…
Emission from within the plunging region of black hole accretion flows has recently been detected in two X-ray binary systems. There is, furthermore, a possible discrepancy between the inferred spins of gravitational wave and…
The thermal continuum emission observed from accreting black holes across X-ray bands has the potential to be leveraged as a powerful probe of the mass and spin of the central black hole. The vast majority of existing ``continuum fitting''…
According to General Relativity, astrophysical black holes are described by a small number of parameters. Apart from the mass of the black hole (M), among the most interesting characteristics is the spin (a), which determines the degree of…
X-ray reverberation echoes are assumed to be produced in the strongly distorted spacetime around accreting supermassive black holes. This signal allows us to spatially map the geometry of the inner accretion flow - a region which cannot yet…
Radiation from the "plunging region" (the space between the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) and the black-hole (BH) surface) of an accretion flow onto a BH is supposed to add a small but significant contribution to the X-ray spectra…
Luminous accreting stellar mass and supermassive black holes produce power-law continuum X-ray emission from a compact central corona. Reverberation time lags occur due to light travel time-delays between changes in the direct coronal…
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…
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…
Spectral timing analyses based upon wavelet transforms provide a new means to study the variability of the X-ray emission from accreting systems, including AGN, stellar mass black holes and neutron stars, and can be used to trace the time…
Accreting black holes are thought to swallow matter in the form of a disk and a hot cloud of plasma that glows brightly in X-rays, known as the corona. The X-ray emitting region is far too small to be directly imaged, but rapid variability…
We investigate the quantum signature of the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO), a region of profound importance in black hole astrophysics. By modeling an atom as an Unruh-DeWitt detector coupled to a massless scalar field in the…
We study analytically a black-hole-ring system which is composed of a stationary axisymmetric ring of particles in orbit around a perturbed Kerr black hole of mass $M$. In particular, we calculate the shift in the orbital frequency of the…
In this paper we study the effective gravitational potential of Schwarzschild, Kerr, Reissner-Nordstr\"om and Kerr-Newman black holes with the relativistic corrections to evaluate the circular orbits and the Innermost Stable Circular Orbits…
Rotating black holes when attached to a cosmic string have their rotational energy extracted leading to a change in its spin and mass. The spin of a black hole can be measured using various methods for an accreting black hole in an X-ray…
The widely used Novikov-Thorne relativistic thin disc equations are only valid down to the radius of the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO). This leads to an undetermined boundary condition at the ISCO, known as the inner stress of the…
Accreting black holes show characteristic reflection features in their X-ray spectrum, including an iron K$\alpha$ line, resulting from hard X-ray continuum photons illuminating the accretion disk. The reverberation lag resulting from the…
The inner boundary of a black hole accretion disk is often set to the marginally stable circular orbit (or the innermost stable circular orbit, ISCO) around the black hole. It is important for the theories of black hole accretion disks and…
The International X-ray Observatory (IXO) is a joint NASA-ESA-JAXA effort. X-ray observations will resolve pressing astrophysical questions such as: What happens close to a black hole? How do supermassive black holes grow? How does large…
The innermost regions of accretion disks around black holes are strongly irradiated by X-rays that are emitted from a highly variable, compact corona, in the immediate vicinity of the black hole. The X-rays that are seen reflected from the…