2016/01/31 by Jiachen Jiang, Cosimo Bambi, James F. Steiner · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Accretion (finance) #Accretion disc #Acoustics #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics #Black hole (networking) #Computer science #Geometry #Line (geometry) #Metric (unit) #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Quantum mechanics #Reverberation #Reverberation mapping #Spacetime #Supermassive black hole #astro-ph.HE #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.93.123008
published as Phys. Rev. D 93, 123008 (2016) · 10 pages, 6 figures. v2: refereed version
arxiv created 2016/06/09 · openalex publication_date 2016/06/16 · arxiv updated 2016/06/17 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The iron K\ensuremathα line commonly observed in the x-ray spectrum of black hole candidates is produced by x-ray fluorescence of the inner accretion disk. This line can potentially be quite a powerful tool to probe the spacetime geometry around these objects and test the Kerr black hole hypothesis. In a previous paper, we studied the ability to constrain possible deviations from the Kerr solution from the standard time-integrated iron line spectrum within the Cardoso-Pani-Rico framework. In the present work, we expand on that study and consider iron line reverberation mapping in the Cardoso-Pani-Rico framework. That is, we consider the time evolution of the iron line profile in response to fluctuations in the x-ray primary source. Our simulations clearly show that the time information in reverberation mapping can better constrain the background metric than the time-integrated approach, and this is true, notably, for the deformation parameter \ensuremathε3r, which is only weakly informed by a time-integrated observation.