A study for testing the Kerr metric with AGN iron line eclipses
arXiv:1603.04115 · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2016/04/054
Abstract
Recently, two of us have studied iron line reverberation mapping to test black hole candidates, showing that the time information in reverberation mapping can better constrain the Kerr metric than the time-integrated approach. Motivated by this finding, here we explore the constraining power of another time-dependent measurement: an AGN iron line eclipse. An obscuring cloud passes between the AGN and the distant observer, covering different parts of the accretion disk at different times. Similar to the reverberation measurement, an eclipse might help to better identify the relativistic effects affecting the X-ray photons. However, this is not what we find. In our study, we employ the Johannsen-Psaltis parametrisation, but we argue that our conclusions hold in a large class of non-Kerr metrics. We explain our results pointing out an important difference between reverberation and eclipse measurements.
1+15 pages, 8 figures. v2: refereed version
References in corpus (19)
- Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
- The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment
- Constraining Black Hole Spin Via X-ray Spectroscopy
- A Metric for Rapidly Spinning Black Holes Suitable for Strong-Field Tests of the No-Hair Theorem
- General parametrization of axisymmetric black holes in metric theories of gravity
- Occultation measurement of the size of the X-ray emitting region in the Active Galactic Nucleus of NGC 1365
- Thin accretion disks in stationary axisymmetric wormhole spacetimes
- Bumpy Black Holes in Alternate Theories of Gravity
- A code to compute the emission of thin accretion disks in non-Kerr space-times and test the nature of black hole candidates
- Kerr Black Holes are Not Unique to General Relativity
- Testing the space-time geometry around black hole candidates with the analysis of the broad K iron line
- Testing Hořava-Lifshitz gravity using thin accretion disk properties
- Rapid N_H changes in NGC 4151
- Constraints on the spacetime geometry around 10 stellar-mass black hole candidates from the disk's thermal spectrum
- Broad K iron line from accretion disks around traversable wormholes
- Using iron line reverberation and spectroscopy to distinguish Kerr and non-Kerr black holes
- Note on the effect of a massive accretion disk in the measurements of black hole spins
- A parametrization to test black hole candidates with the spectrum of thin disks
- Note on the Cardoso-Pani-Rico parametrization to test the Kerr black hole hypothesis