Relativistic Iron Lines in Galactic Black Holes: Recent Results and Lines in the ASCA Archive

Abstract

Recent observations with Chandra and XMM-Newton, aided by broad-band spectral coverage from RXTE, have revealed skewed relativistic iron emission lines in stellar-mass Galactic black hole systems. Such systems are excellent laboratories for testing General Relativity, and relativistic iron lines provide an important tool for making such tests. In this contribution to the Proceedings of the 10th Annual Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity, we briefly review recent developments and present initial results from fits to archival ASCA observations of Galactic black holes. It stands to reason that relativistic effects, if real, should be revealed in many systems (rather than just one or two); the results of our archival work have borne-out this expectation. The ASCA spectra reveal skewed, relativistic lines in XTE J1550-564, GRO J1655-40, GRS 1915+105, and Cygnus X-1.

to appear in the proc. of the 10th Annual Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity, 5 pages, 1 figure, uses specific .cls and .sty files

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• The Extreme Spin of the Black Hole in Cygnus X-1
• Compact Binary Coalescences in the Band of Ground-based Gravitational-Wave Detectors
• Black hole accretion disks in the canonical low-hard state
• The high energy emission of GRO J1655-40 as revealed with INTEGRAL spectroscopy of the 2005 outburst
• A Short Review of Relativistic Iron Lines from Stellar-Mass Black Holes
• Suzaku Observations of the Galactic Center Microquasar 1E 1740.7-2942
• The onset of General Relativity: Gravitationally redshifted emission lines