Related papers: Testing the Weak Equivalence Principle near black …
Recently, strong evidence was found for the presence of higher-order modes in the gravitational wave signals GW190412 and GW190814, which originated from compact binary coalescences with significantly asymmetric component masses. This has…
Tests of the Weak Equivalence Principle can reveal a new, composition dependent, force of nature or disprove many models of new physics. For the first time such a test is successfully carried out in space by the MICROSCOPE satellite. Early…
Neutron stars and black holes are the astrophysical systems with the strongest gravitational fields in the universe. In this article, I review the prospect of probing with observations of such compact objects some of the most intriguing…
The possible detection of echoes in late gravitational-wave signals is the most promising way to test horizonless alternatives to general relativistic black holes, and probe the physics of these hypothetical ultra-compact objects. While…
Recent strong-field regime tests of gravity are so far in agreement with general relativity. In particular, astrophysical black holes appear all to be consistent with the Kerr spacetime, but the statistical error on current observations…
The X-ray observation of black hole candidates provides a valuable tool to probe regions very close to the central black hole, where strong-field relativistic effects become important. Recent studies have shown that these effects seem to…
Future ground-based gravitational wave observatories will be ideal probes of the environments surrounding black holes with masses $1 - 10\,\mathrm{M_\odot}$. Binary black hole mergers with mass ratios of order $q=m_2/m_1\lesssim10^{-3}$ can…
X-ray reflection spectroscopy is a powerful technique for probing the nature of gravity around black holes in the so-called strong field regime. One of the most popular of such probes is to look at theory-agnostic deviations away from the…
Electron accelerations of the order of $10^{21} g$ obtained by laser fields open up the possibility of experimentally testing one of the cornerstones of general relativity, the weak equivalence principle, which states that the local effects…
The EHT collaboration released in 2019 the first horizon-scale images of a black hole accretion flow, opening a novel route for plasma physics comprehension and gravitational tests. Although the present unresolved images deeply depend on…
A thought experiment considered recently in the literature, in which it is investigated whether a dyonic Kerr-Newman black hole can be destroyed by overcharging or overspinning it past extremality by a massive complex scalar test field, is…
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,…
For a model of the electromagnetic field coupled to Weyl tensor, Maxwell equations are modified and photons at low frequencies no longer propagate along light cone. If we detect a black hole using these photons, some difficulties appear…
Astrophysical tests of general relativity belong to two categories: 1) "internal", i.e. consistency tests within the theory (for example, tests that astrophysical black holes are indeed described by the Kerr solution and its perturbations),…
The recently released images of the supermassive black holes in the M87 galaxy and the galaxy of our own make probing black hole spacetimes and testing general relativity (GR) possible. The violation of equatorial reflection symmetry of…
We studied optical-ultraviolet spectral energy distribution of 10 weak emission-line quasars (WLQs) which lie at redshifts z = 0.19 and 1.43 < z < 3.48. The theoretical models of their accretion disk continua are created based on the…
Assuming that general relativity is the correct theory of gravity in the strong field limit, can gravitational wave observations distinguish between black hole and other compact object sources? Alternatively, can gravitational wave…
The observation of the shadow of the supermassive black hole M87$^{*}$ by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is sensitive to the spacetime geometry near the circular photon orbit and beyond, and it thus has the potential to test general…
In recent literature, it has been argued that a mild form of the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) is satisfied by wide classes of effective field theories in which higher-derivative corrections can be shown to shift the charge-to-mass ratios…
This paper surveys our current knowledge of the hard X-ray emission properties of old accreting neutron stars in low mass X-ray binaries. Hard X-ray components extending up to energies of a few hundred keV have been clearly detected in…