Related papers: Testing the Weak Equivalence Principle near black …
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…
We pioneer the black hole mass gap as a powerful new tool for constraining modified gravity theories. These theories predict fifth forces that alter the structure and evolution of population-III stars, exacerbating the pair-instability.…
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.…
Gravitational wave observations will be excellent tools for making precise measurements of processes that occur in very strong-field regions of spacetime. Extreme mass ratio systems, formed by the capture of a stellar mass body compact by a…
When adopted in black hole spacetimes, geometric-optics approximations imply a mapping between the quasinormal mode (QNM) spectrum of black holes in the eikonal limit and black hole images. In particular, the real part and the imaginary…
We show that collider experiments have the potential to exclude a light scalar field as well as generic models of modified gravity as dark energy candidates. Our mechanism uses the spectrum radiated by black holes and can equally well be…
We employ the method of comparison equations to study the propagation of a massless minimally coupled scalar field on the Schwarzschild background. In particular, we show that this method allows us to obtain explicit approximate expressions…
The Strong Equivalence Principle (SEP) demands, besides the validity of the Einstein Equivalence Principle, that all self-gravitating bodies feel the same acceleration in an external gravitational field. It has been found that metric…
Tensor-scalar theory is a wide class of alternative theory of gravitation that can be motivated by higher dimensional theories, by models of dark matter or dark ernergy. In the general case, the scalar field will couple non-universally to…
It has been speculated that quantum gravity corrections may lead to modifications to space-time geometry near black hole horizons. Such structures may cause reflections to gravitational waves, causing {\it echoes} that follow the main…
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…
Einstein's weak equivalence principle (WEP) states that any freely falling, uncharged test particle follows the same identical trajectory independent of its internal structure and composition. Since the polarization of a photon is…
Extreme mass ratio binary systems, binaries involving stellar mass objects orbiting massive black holes, are considered to be a primary source of gravitational radiation to be detected by the space-based interferometer LISA. The numerical…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture arises from the requirement that it be possible for all (classically stable) extremal black holes to decay. The ``black hole version'' of the conjecture requires that it should be possible for this to occur…
We provide an analytic method to discriminate among different types of black holes on the ground of their strong field gravitational lensing properties. We expand the deflection angle of the photon in the neighbourhood of complete capture,…
We study binary black hole mergers in the extreme mass-ratio limit. We determine the energy, angular momentum, and linear momentum of the post-merger, remnant black hole. Unlike previous works, we perform our analysis directly in the…
The weak equivalence principle is studied in a space with noncommutativity of coordinates and noncommutativity of momenta. We find conditions on the parameters of noncommutativity which give the possibility to recover the equivalence…
We analyze simultaneous observations with NuSTAR and Swift of the black hole binary GX 339-4 in which we clearly detect both a strong thermal component and prominent relativistic reflection features. We employ NKBB and RELXILL_NK, which are…
We model non-thermal emission spectrum of the extremely sub-Eddington X-ray binary system A0620-00. It is believed that this non-thermal emission is produced by a radiatively inefficient "quiescent" accretion onto a stellar-mass black hole…
Perturbed Kerr black holes emit gravitational radiation, which (for the practical purposes of gravitational-wave astronomy) consists of a superposition of damped sinusoids termed quasi-normal modes. The frequencies and time-constants of the…