Testing General Relativity with Black Hole X-Ray Data and ABHModels

Abstract

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 strong field regime. Today, we have gravitational wave data of the coalescence of stellar-mass black holes, radio images of the supermassive black holes SgrA${}^{\ast }$ and M87${}^{\ast }$, and high-quality X-ray data of stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries and supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei. In this manuscript, we will review current efforts to test General Relativity with black hole X-ray data and we will provide a detailed description of the public codes available on ABHModels.

31 pages, 5 figures. Talk given at the Frascati Workshop 2023 "Multifrequency Behaviour of High Energy Cosmic Sources - XIV" (Palermo, Italy, 12-17 June 2023). v2: refereed version

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