Related papers: Testing General Relativity with Black Hole X-Ray D…
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…
The presence of spacetime singularities in physically relevant solutions of the Einstein Equations is normally interpreted as a symptom of the breakdown of classical general relativity at very high densities/curvatures. However, despite…
While tested to a high level of accuracy in the Solar system, general relativity is under the spotlight of both theoreticians and observers on larger scales, mainly because of the need to introduce dark matter and dark energy in the…
X-ray timing observations of accreting stellar mass black holes have shown that they can produce signals with such short time scales that we must be probing very close to the innermost stable circular orbit that is predicted by the theory…
Black holes are the sources of the strongest gravitational fields that can be found today in the Universe and are ideal laboratories for testing Einstein's theory of General Relativity in the strong field regime. In this letter, I show that…
The extreme-gravity collisions of binaries with one black hole and one neutron star provide for excellent tests of general relativity. We here study how well one can constrain theories beyond general relativity with additional scalar fields…
This paper reviews the field of gamma-ray astronomy and describes future experiments and prospects for advances in fundamental physics and high-energy astrophysics through gamma-ray measurements. We concentrate on recent progress in the…
General relativity (GR) passed many astronomical tests but in majority of them GR predictions have been tested in a weak gravitational field approximation. Around 50 years ago a shadow has been introduced by J. Bardeen as a purely…
Astrophysical black hole candidates are thought to be the Kerr black holes of general relativity, but the actual nature of these objects has still to be confirmed. The continuum-fitting and the iron line methods are currently the only…
Electromagnetic observations of the radiation emitted by an accretion disk around a black hole, as well as gravitational wave observations of coalescing binaries, can be used to probe strong-field gravity. We here compare the constraints…
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…
We present new calculations of X-ray polarization from black hole accretion disks in the thermally-dominated state, using a Monte-Carlo ray-tracing code in full general relativity. In contrast to many previously published studies, our…
We study the sensitivity required for a future space-based detector to search for beyond general relativity effect in gravitational wave detection. To do this, we use the current design of TianQin, LISA, and $\mu$Ares as starting points,…
This review discusses the current status of supermassive black hole research, as seen from a purely observational standpoint. Since the early '90s, rapid technological advances, most notably the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, the…
BlackHoleCam is a project funded by a European Research Council Synergy Grant to build a complete astrophysical description of nearby supermassive black holes by using a combination of radio imaging, pulsar observations, stellar astrometry…
Recent high quality broad-band X-ray and gamma-ray observations of Galactic black holes by ASCA, Ginga, RXTE, and CGRO show that the spectra cannot be described by simple thermal Comptonization models (even including a fully relativistic…
The inspirals of ``small'' ($1 - 100 M_\odot$) compact bodies through highly relativistic orbits of massive (several $\times 10^5 M_\odot -$ several $\times 10^6 M_\odot$) black holes are among the most anticipated sources for the LISA…
The discovery of a pulsar (PSR) in orbit around a black hole (BH) is expected to provide a superb new probe of relativistic gravity and BH properties. Apart from a precise mass measurement for the BH, one could expect a clean verification…
Gravitational-wave sources offer us unique testbeds for probing strong-field, dynamical and nonlinear aspects of gravity. In this chapter, we give a brief overview of the current status and future prospects of testing General Relativity…
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are perfect laboratories to check General Relativity (GR) effects by using Broad Line Region (BLR) clouds eclipses to probe the innermost regions of the accretion disk. A new relativistic X-ray spectral model…