Testing General Relativity with Supermassive Black Holes Using X-Ray Reflection Spectroscopy

Askar B. Abdikamalov; Dimitry Ayzenberg; Cosimo Bambi; Sourabh Nampalliwar; Ashutosh Tripathi; Jelen Wong; Yerong Xu; Jinli Yan; Yunfeng Yan; Yuchan Yang

doi:10.3390/proceedings2019017002

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and

¹

Center for Field Theory and Particle Physics and Department of Physics, Fudan University, Shanghai 200438, China

²

Theoretical Astrophysics, Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany

^*

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

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Presented at the meeting Recent Progress in Relativistic Astrophysics, Shanghai, China, 6–8 May 2019.

Proceedings2019, 17(1), 2;https://doi.org/10.3390/proceedings2019017002

This article belongs to the Proceedings Recent Progress in Relativistic Astrophysics

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Abstract

In this paper, we review our current efforts to test General Relativity in the strong field regime by studying the reflection spectrum of supermassive black holes. So far we have analyzed 11 sources with observations of NuSTAR, Suzaku, Swift, and XMM-Newton. Our results are consistent with General Relativity, according to which the spacetime metric around astrophysical black holes should be well approximated by the Kerr solution. We discuss the systematic uncertainties in our model and we present a preliminary study on the impact of some of them on the measurement of the spacetime metric.

Keywords:

General Relativity; black holes; AGNs; X-ray reflection spectroscopy

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Testing General Relativity with Supermassive Black Holes Using X-Ray Reflection Spectroscopy †

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Testing General Relativity with Supermassive Black Holes Using X-Ray Reflection Spectroscopy^†