Related papers: Testing General Relativity with black hole X-ray d…
Modified gravity theories have been suggested to address the limitations of general relativity, each exhibiting differences, particularly in their strong-field limits. Nonetheless, there lacks effective means to distinguish or test these…
Extreme-mass-ratio-inspiral observations from future space-based gravitational-wave detectors such as LISA will enable strong-field tests of general relativity with unprecedented precision, but at prohibitive computational cost if existing…
The last decade has seen a leapfrog in the interest in X-ray polarimetry with a number of new polarization measurements in hard X-rays from AstroSat, POLAR, GAP, and PoGO+. The measurements provide some interesting insights into various…
We describe and present the first observational evidence that light propagating near a rotating black hole is twisted in phase and carries orbital angular momentum. The novel use of this physical observable as an additional tool for the…
Atom interferometry is now reaching sufficient precision to motivate laboratory tests of general relativity. We begin by explaining the non-relativistic calculation of the phase shift in an atom interferometer and deriving its range of…
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 spectrum of the hard X-ray background records the history of accretion processes integrated over the cosmic time. Several observational and theoretical evidences indicate that a significant fraction of the energy density is obscured by…
The confrontation between General Relativity and experimental results, notably binary pulsar data, is summarized and its significance discussed. The agreement between experiment and theory is numerically very impressive. However, some…
We review the experimental evidence for Einstein's special and general relativity. A variety of high precision null experiments verify the weak equivalence principle and local Lorentz invariance, while gravitational redshift and other clock…
The past 10 years have seen remarkable progress in our capability of analyzing reflection features in the X-ray spectra of accreting black holes. Today X-ray reflection spectroscopy is a mature technique and a powerful tool for studying the…
X-ray polarimetry promises to give qualitatively new information about high-energy sources. Examples of interesting source classes are binary black hole systems, rotation and accretion powered neutron stars, Microquasars, Active Galactic…
Deviations from general relativity, such as could be responsible for the cosmic acceleration, would influence the growth of large scale structure and the deflection of light by that structure. We clarify the relations between several…
We combine measurements of galaxy velocities from galaxy surveys with measurements of the Weyl potential from the Dark Energy Survey to test the consistency of General Relativity at cosmological scales. Taking the ratio of two…
Einstein's General Relativity theory has been tested in many ways during the last hundred years as reviewed in this chapter. Two tests are discussed in detail in this article: the concept of a zero gravity surface, the roots of which go…
This talk is based on my work in collaboration with Thibault Damour since 1991. Unified theories, like superstrings, predict the existence of scalar partners to the graviton. Such theories of gravity can be very close to general relativity…
Gravitational-wave observations of binary black holes allow new tests of general relativity to be performed on strong, dynamical gravitational fields. These tests require accurate waveform models of the gravitational-wave signal, otherwise…
Einstein's theory of General Relativity predicts that the spacetime metric around astrophysical black holes is described by the Kerr solution. In this work, we employ state-of-the-art in relativistic reflection modeling to analyze a…
In this work some aspects of the detection of certain general relativistic effects in the weak gravitational field of the Earth via laser-ranged data to some existing or proposed geodetic satellites are examined. The focus is on the…
Computer simulations are enabling researchers to investigate systems which are extremely difficult to handle analytically. In the particular case of General Relativity, numerical models have proved extremely valuable for investigations of…
X-ray reflection spectroscopy is potentially a powerful tool to probe the spacetime geometry around astrophysical black holes and test general relativity in the strong field regime. However, precision tests of general relativity are only…