Testing General Relativity with black hole X-ray data: recent progress and future developments

Abstract

The theory of General Relativity has successfully passed a large number of observational tests. The theory has been extensively tested in the weak-field regime with experiments in the Solar System and observations of binary pulsars. The past five years have seen significant advancements in the study of the strong-field regime, which can now be tested with gravitational waves, X-ray data, and mm Very Long Baseline Interferometry observations. Here I summarize the state-of-the-art of the tests of General Relativity with black hole X-ray data, discussing its recent progress and future developments.

Constraining the KRZ deformation parameters I: limits from supermassive black hole X-ray data

“…There are several techniques in vogue today which probe BHs and their environments. Theory-agnostic tests of gravity have been performed with gravitational waves (GWs) [4,11,12], X-ray spectroscopy [13][14][15][16], BH imaging [17][18][19], and infrared observations of the Galactic Center [20]. Our focus in this work is on X-ray reflection spectroscopy (XRS).…”