5 papers
Testing Black Holes with Interstellar Missions: I. Orbiting Probes
Leda Gao, Cosimo Bambi, Yi Fan +3
Recently, we showed that the possibility of an interstellar mission to the closest black hole, while highly speculative and extremely challenging, is not completely unrealistic wit…
Modeling X-ray reflection spectra from returning radiation: application to 4U 163047
Kostas Kourmpetis, Shafqat Riaz, Honghui Liu +6
Returning radiation is thought to play a key role in disk illumination of black hole X-ray binaries in the high-soft state, yet it has not been fully incorporated into XSPEC reflec…
Modeling reflection spectra of super-Eddington X-ray sources
Swarnim Shashank, Askar B. Abdikamalov, Honghui Liu +5
Relativistic reflection is a common feature in the X-ray observations of accreting compact objects. We present reflux, a new X-ray reflection model for spectral analysis of super-E…
Exploring black hole shadows in axisymmetric spacetimes with coordinate-independent methods and neural networks
Temurbek Mirzaev, Bobomurat Ahmedov, Cosimo Bambi
The study of black hole shadows provides a powerful tool for testing the predictions of general relativity and exploring deviations from the standard Kerr metric in the strong grav…
X-ray reflection spectroscopy with improved calculations of the emission angle
Yimin Huang, Honghui Liu, Temurbek Mirzaev +10
The reflection spectrum produced by a cold medium illuminated by X-ray photons is not isotropic and its shape depends on the emission angle. In the reflection spectrum of an accret…