Related papers: Testing Relativistic Accretion Disk Models with GR…

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…

Relativistic X-ray emission lines from the inner accretion disk around black holes are reviewed. Recent observations with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission-Newton, and Suzaku are revealing these lines to be good…

4U 1543-47 is a low mass X-ray binary which harbours a stellar-mass black hole located in our Milky Way galaxy. In this paper, we revisit 7 data sets which were in the Steep Power Law state of the 2002 outburst. The spectra were observed by…

Classical modelling suggests that, during the RXTE observations studied, GRS 1915+105 was near or above the critical accretion rate and the optically thick inner disk penetrated inside the advection-dominated flow. The system was very…

Theoretical studies suggest that gravitational collapse can form either a black hole or a visible (naked) singularity. Identifying observational signatures that distinguish these two types of collapsed objects is a holy grail of physics.…

X-ray spectroscopy of galactic black hole binaries serve as a powerful tool to gain an overall understanding of the system. Not only can the properties of the accretion disk be studied in detail, the fundamental properties of the black hole…

Astrophysical black hole systems are the ideal laboratories for testing Einstein's theory of gravity in the strong field regime. We have recently developed a framework which uses the reflection spectrum of black hole systems to perform…

We show that disc continuum fitting can be used to constrain black hole spin in a subclass of Narrow Line Seyfert 1 (NLS1) AGN as their low mass and high mass accretion rate means that the disc peaks at energies just below the soft X-ray…

This is the third paper in a series describing the spectroscopic properties of a sample of 39 AGN at $z \sim 1.5$, selected to cover a large range in black hole mass ($M_{BH}$) and Eddington ratio ($L/L_{Edd}$). In this paper, we continue…

There are many simplifications in current relativistic reflection models and this introduces systematic uncertainties in the measurement of the properties of the source. In this paper, we study the impact of the radiation crossing the…

We present a spectral analysis of a black hole X-ray binary XTE J2012+381 during its 2022 outburst, using data from NICER and AstroSat. Combining data from NICER, LAXPC20, and SXT, we extract energy spectra covering the 0.7-10.0 keV range.…

We critically examine issues associated with determining the fundamental properties of the black hole and the surrounding accretion disk in an X-ray binary based on modeling the disk X-ray continuum of the source. We base our work mainly on…

We present a new analysis of Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer observations of the 2002 outburst of the transient X-ray nova 4U 1543-47. We focus on observations in the High/Soft state, and attempt to measure the spin of the black hole by…

We calculate the structure of accretion disk around a spinning black hole for accretion rates 0.01 - 10 M_sun/s. The model is fully relativistic and treats accurately the disk microphysics including neutrino emissivity, opacity, electron…

While Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity (GR) has been tested extensively in our solar system, it is just beginning to be tested in the strong gravitational fields that surround black holes. As a way to study the behavior of…

Accretion disk reflection spectra, including broad iron emission lines, bear the imprints of the strong Doppler shifts and gravitational red-shifts close to black holes. The extremity of these shifts depends on the proximity of the…

Disc spectra from highly luminous black hole binaries are observed to be rather simple, despite theoretical predictions to the contrary. We collate the disc-dominated spectra from multiple observations of 10 separate sources, and show that…

In this thesis a computational tool for modelling spectral features of X-ray sources in a strong gravitational field is developed. Six transfer functions, the gravitational and Doppler shift, lensing, emission angle, relative time delay,…

We analyze {\it simultaneously} six composite {\it RXTE} spectra of GX 339--4 in the hard state comprising 77 million counts collected over 196 ks. The source spectra are ordered by luminosity and spanthe range 1.6\% to 17\% of the…

Several massive black holes exhibit flux variability on time scales that correspond to source sizes of the order of few Schwarzschild radii. We survey the potential of near-infrared and X-ray polarimetry to constrain physical properties of…