Related papers: Small-scale structure deduced from X- and gamma-ra…
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…
The recent progress in the understanding the physical nature of neutron star equilibrium configurations and the first observational evidence of a genuinely short gamma-ray burst, GRB 090227B, allows to give an estimate of the gravitational…
We review some of the ways that X-ray observations provide unique information on radio galaxies. Thermal bremsstrahlung X-ray emission provides detailed data on ambient densities and temperatures. These parameters in turn can be used for…
The characteristic physical timescales near stellar-mass compact objects are measured in milliseconds. These timescales -- the free-fall time, the fastest stable orbital period, and stellar spin periods -- encode the fundamental physical…
We present a mission designed for the study of transient phenomena in the high energy sky, through a wide field X-ray/hard X-ray monitor, and fast (< 1 min) follow up observations with Narrow Field Instrumentation. This is based on an X-ray…
Observations at high energies yield important information on the structure and nature of AGN; when coupled with deep optical and near-infrared (photometric and spectroscopic) follow-up, they provide constraints on the mass of the growing…
This chapter discusses the implications of X-ray binaries on our knowledge of Type Ibc and Type II supernovae. X-ray binaries contain accreting neutron stars and stellar--mass black holes which are the end points of massive star evolution.…
X-ray astronomy is closely related to the study of black hole sources. The discovery that some unseen objects, more massive than any degenerate star, emit huge amounts of X-rays helped accept the concept that back holes are present in X-ray…
The past 10 years have seen tremendous progress in our capability of testing General Relativity in the strong field regime with black hole observations. 10 years ago, the theory of General Relativity was almost completely unexplored in the…
We review results from cosmic X-ray surveys of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) over the past ~ 15 yr that have dramatically improved our understanding of growing supermassive black holes in the distant universe. First, we discuss the utility…
Absorption and reprocessing of Gamma-ray burst radiation in the environment of cosmological GRBs can be used as a powerful probe of the elusive nature of their progenitors. Although it is widely accepted that long-duration GRBs are…
Gravitational wave observations will be excellent tools for making precise measurements of processes that occur in very strong-field regions of spacetime. Extreme mass ratio systems, formed by the capture of a stellar mass body compact by a…
We report the results of XMM-Newton observations of Sgr A*, the radiative counterpart of the massive black hole at the nucleus of our Galaxy, performed in the frame of the guaranteed time survey program of the Galactic Center region. The…
Black-hole neutron-star coalescing binaries have been invoked as one of the most suitable scenario to explain the emission of short gamma-ray bursts. Indeed, if the black-hole which forms after the merger, is surrounded by a massive disk,…
Normal galaxies are faint and complex X-ray sources that provide very powerful probes for fundamental astrophysical questions. Examples include: the study of populations of X-ray emitting sources; the study of the entire spectrum of…
This dissertation elaborates on X-ray polarisation features of astrophysical environments near accreting black holes. Although the work was originally assigned to supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei, the results are also…
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…
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…
We review the unique cosmological implications of the XMM-LSS survey in association with its multi-WL follow-up: (1) Large Scale Structures traced by X-ray clusters and AGNs, optical galaxies, weak lensing as well as Sunyaev-Zel'dovich…
Extragalactic X-ray surveys are exceptionally powerful tools for studying the evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies, by detecting large numbers of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and star-forming galaxies over a wide…