Related papers: Testing the Weak Equivalence Principle near black …
The astrophysical consequences of the presence of a quintessence scalar field on the evolution of the horizon and on the accretion disk surrounding a static black hole, in the Scalar-Vector-Tensor version of Modified Gravity (MOG), are…
The equivalence principle, that is one of the main pillars of general relativity, is very well tested in the Solar system; however, its validity is more uncertain on cosmological scales, or when dark matter is concerned. This article shows…
Einstein's Weak Equivalence Principle (WEP), the universality of free fall, is a fundamental component of general relativity and other metric theories of gravity. Its validity can be tested through the post-Newtonian parameter gamma, which…
Accretion of dark energy onto black holes will take place when dark energy is not a cosmological constant. It has been proposed that the time evolution of the mass of the black holes in binary systems due to dark energy accretion could be…
Gravitational-wave (GW) observations of binary black holes offer the best probes of the relativistic, strong-field regime of gravity. Gravitational radiation, in the leading order is quadrupolar. However, non-quadrupole (higher-order) modes…
We propose a generalisation of the Weak Gravity Conjecture in de Sitter space by studying charged black-holes and comparing the gravitational and an abelian gauge forces. Using the same condition as in flat space, namely the absence of…
The idea of a unified description of supermassive and stellar black holes has been supported by the extension of the empirical radio/X-ray correlation from X-ray binaries to active galactic nuclei through the inclusion of a mass term. This…
Most X-ray novae (aka soft X-ray transients) contain black hole primaries. In particular, the large mass functions measured for six X-ray novae directly clinch the argument (within general relativity) that they contain black holes. These…
The existence of a light or massive scalar field with a coupling to matter weaker than gravitational strength is a possible source of violation of the weak equivalence principle. We use the first results on the E\"otv\"os parameter by the…
A conservative constraint on the Einstein Weak Equivalence Principle (WEP) can be obtained under the assumption that the observed time delay between correlated particles from astronomical sources is dominated by the gravitational fields…
Most theories that predict time and/or space variation of fundamental constants also predict violations of the Weak Equivalence Principle. In 2004 Khoury and Weltman proposed the so called chameleon field arguing that it could help avoiding…
We show explicitly, for different types of extremal black holes, that test fields satisfying the null energy condition at the event horizon cannot violate the weak cosmic censorship conjecture. This is done by checking, in each case, that…
Blurred reflection features are commonly observed in the X-ray spectra of accreting black holes. In the presence of high-quality data and with the correct astrophysical model, X-ray reflection spectroscopy is a powerful tool to probe the…
According to the asymptotically safe gravity, black holes may have characteristics different from those described according to general relativity if the running of the gravitational constant coupling happens at low energies. Particularly,…
We perform the first fully nonlinear numerical simulations of black-hole binaries with mass ratios 100:1. Our technique for evolving such extreme mass ratios is based on the moving puncture approach with a new gauge condition and an optimal…
The Weak Equivalence Principle (WEP) is a central pillar of general relativity. Its precise test with quantum systems in space offers a unique window onto new physics. Here we report the first in-orbit quantum test of the WEP. A…
In theories with a perturbatively massless 2-form (dual to an axion), a paradox may arise in the process of black hole evaporation. Schwarzschild black holes can support a non-trivial Wilson-line-type field, the integral of the 2-form…
We construct several charged regular black hole metrics employing mass distribution functions which are inspired by continuous probability distributions. Some of these metrics satisfy the weak energy condition and asymptotically behave as…
Astrophysical black holes are thought to be the Kerr black holes predicted by general relativity, but macroscopic deviations from the Kerr solution can be expected from a number of scenarios involving new physics. In Paper I, we studied the…
We discuss the emergent spectra from accreting black holes, considering in particular the case where the accretion is characterized by relativistic bulk motion. We suggest that such accretion is likely to occur in a wide variety of black…