Related papers: Time Lags in Compact Objects: Constraints on the E…
We systematically analyzed about a terabyte of data from Galactic binary systems to characterize how these spectra change as a function of mass accretion rate. With this volume of data we are able to identify the differences in behaviour of…
Hard X-ray emission is ubiquitous in accreting black holes, both in Galactic binary systems and in Active Galactic Nuclei. I review the different spectra which can be seen from these systems, and possible ways of producing this emission.…
Accretion disks around supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei produce continuum radiation at ultraviolet and optical wavelengths. Physical processes in the accretion flow lead to stochastic variability of this emission on a wide…
In X-ray binaries, several percent of the compact object luminosity is intercepted by the surface of the normal companion and re-radiated through Compton reflection and the K-fluorescence. This reflected emission follows the variability of…
Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) with luminosities lying between ~3x10^{39} - 2x10^{40} erg/s represent a contentious sample of objects as their brightness, together with a lack of unambiguous mass estimates for the vast majority of the…
Multi-wavelength observations of Galactic black hole candidate sources indicate a close connection between the accretion disk emission and the jet emission. The recent discovery of an anti-correlated time lag between the soft and hard…
A solid theoretical understanding of how inflowing, accreting plasma around black holes and other compact objects gives rise to outflowing winds and jets is still lacking, despite decades of observations. The fact that similar processes and…
The origin of the observed time lags, in nearby active galactic nuclei (AGN), between hard and soft X-ray photons is investigated using new XMM-Newton data for the narrow-line Seyfert I galaxy Ark 564 and existing data for 1H0707-495 and…
We discuss the expected X-ray spectral and variability properties of black hole accretion discs at high luminosity, under the hypothesis that radiation pressure dominated discs are subject to violent clumping instabilities and, as a result,…
Numerical simulations of MHD accretion flows in the vicinity of a supermasssive black hole provide important insights to the problem of why and how systems -- such as the Galactic Center -- are underluminous and variable. To access…
Warm absorber spectra contain bound-bound and bound-free absorption features seen in the X-ray and UV spectra from many active galactic nuclei (AGN). The widths and centroid energies of these features indicate they occur in outflowing gas,…
The geometry of the accretion flow around stellar-mass black holes can change on timescales of days to months. When a black hole emerges from quiescence (that is, it "turns on" after accreting material from its companion) it has a very hard…
X-ray transients appeared in optically non-active galactic nuclei have been observed in recent years. The most popular model explaining this kind of phenomena is the conventional tidal disruption model. In this model, when a star moves…
In the vicinity of black holes, the influence of strong gravity, plasma physics, and emission processes govern the behavior of the system. Since observations such as those carried out by the EHT are not yet able to unambiguously constrain…
We review the timing and spectral evolution of black hole X-ray binary systems, with emphasis on the current accretion-ejection paradigm. When in outburst, stellar mass black hole binaries may become the brightest X-ray sources in the sky.…
The X-ray spectra of black hole binaries in the low/hard state first harden as the flux decreases, then soften. This change in behaviour has been variously attributed to either the X-rays switching from being produced in the flow to being…
The scaling relations between the black hole (BH) mass and soft lag properties for both active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and BH X-ray binaries (BHXRBs) suggest the same underlying physical mechanism at work in accreting BH systems spanning a…
We present the results from the spectral analysis of more than 7,500 RXTE spectra of 10 AGN, which have been observed by RXTE regularly over a long period of time ~ 7-11 years. These observations most probably sample most of the flux and…
To understand the physical processes governing accretion discs we can study active galactic nuclei (AGN), X-ray binary systems (XRBs) and cataclysmic variables (CVs). It has been shown that XRBs and CVs show similar observational properties…
Recently, we reported an observational correlation between a) the time-lag of the hard (9 - 15 keV) with respect to the soft (2 - 5 keV) X-ray photons in black-hole X-ray binaries (BHXRBs) and b) the power-law photon index $\Gamma$ of the…