Related papers: Testing the Kerr black hole hypothesis using X-ray…
The specific angular momentum of a Kerr black hole must not be larger than its mass. The observational confirmation of this bound which we call a Kerr bound directly suggests the existence of a black hole. In order to investigate…
Recently, Kumar and Ghosh have derived Kerr-like rotating black hole solutions in the framework of four-dimensional Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory of gravity and investigated the black hole shadow. Using the steady-state Novikov-Thorne model,…
Hard X-ray emission is ubiquitous in accreting black holes, both in Galactic binary systems and in Active Galactic Nuclei. I review the different spectra which can be seen from these systems, and possible ways of producing this emission.…
The continuum-fitting and the iron-line methods are currently the two leading techniques for measuring the spins of accreting black holes. In the past few years, these two methods have been developed for testing fundamental physics. In the…
In this article we discuss a possible way of testing the Kerr black hole hypothesis by taking advantage of phenomena correlated with chaotic motion in the final stages of an accretion disk around a bumpy black hole. We anticipate that these…
The profile of the fluorescent iron line from black hole accretion disks is a powerful diagnostic of black hole properties, such as spin and inclination. The state-of-the-art, however, considers an accretion disk whose angular momentum is…
Accreting black holes are believed to emit X-rays which then mediate information about strong gravity in the vicinity of the emission region. We report on a set of new routines for the Xspec package for analysing X-ray spectra of black-hole…
We present the first X-ray reverberation mass measurement of a stellar-mass black hole. Accreting stellar-mass and supermassive black holes display characteristic spectral features resulting from reprocessing of hard X-rays by the accretion…
We consider thin accretion disks in the field of a class of rotating regular black holes. For this purpose, we obtain the radius of the innermost stable circular orbit, $r_{ISCO}$ and efficiency of accretion disk in converting matter into…
Self-consistent vertical structure models together with non-LTE radiative transfer should produce spectra from accretion disks around black holes which differ from multitemperature blackbodies at levels which may be observed. High…
This is an introduction to models of accretion discs around black holes. After a presentation of the non-relativistic equations describing the structure and evolution of geometrically thin accretion discs we discuss their steady-state…
We generalize previous calculations to a fully relativistic treatment of adiabatic oscillations which are trapped in the inner regions of accretion disks by non-Newtonian gravitational effects of a black hole. We employ the Kerr geometry…
X-ray irradiation of the accretion disc leads to strong reflection features, which are then broadened and distorted by relativistic effects. We present a detailed, general relativistic approach to model this irradiation for different…
We describe a new approach to calculating photon trajectories and gravitational lensing effects in the strong gravitational field of the Kerr black hole. These techniques are applied to explore both the imaging and spectral properties of…
We present an analysis of the observed broad iron line feature and putative warm absorber in the long 2001 XMM-Newton observation of the Seyfert-1.2 galaxy MCG-6-30-15. The new "kerrdisk" model we have designed for simulating line emission…
We discuss the application of simple relativistically-blurred X-ray reflection models to the determination of the spin and the inner radius of the disc in accreting black holes. Observationally, the nature of the corona is uncertain a…
We investigate the structure and emission properties of a thin accretion disk around a rotating charged black hole described by an effective higher-curvature-inspired spacetime, constructed as a phenomenological deformation of the Kerr…
We performed detailed calculations of the relativistic effects acting on both the reflection continuum and the iron line from accretion discs around rotating black holes. Fully relativistic transfer of both illuminating and reprocessed…
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…
In this review article I attempt to summarise past and present-ongoing-work on the problem of the inspiral of a small body in the gravitational field of a much more massive Kerr black hole. Such extreme mass ratio systems, expected to occur…