Abstract
Einstein’s theory of General Relativity is one of the pillars of modern physics. For decades, the theory has been mainly tested in the weak field regime with experiments in the Solar System and observations of binary pulsars. Thanks to a new generation of observational facilities, the past 5 years have seen remarkable changes in this field and there are now numerous efforts for testing General Relativity in the strong field regime with black holes and neutron stars using different techniques. Here I will review the work of my group at Fudan University devoted to test General Relativity with black hole X-ray data.
Highlights
Einstein’s theory of General Relativity was proposed at the end of 1915 [26]
In Refs. [3,15], we presented the first version of the relativistic reflection model relxill_nk, which is an extension of the relxill package developed by Thomas Dauser and Javier Garcia [23,30,31]
All current measurements of α13 are consistent with α13 = 0, as it is requested by General Relativity
Summary
Einstein’s theory of General Relativity was proposed at the end of 1915 [26]. After more than 100 years and without any modification, General Relativity is still one of the pillars of modern physics. In General Relativity, black holes are simple objects and are completely characterized by three parameters, which are associated, respectively, to the mass, the spin angular momentum, and the electric charge of the object. This is the result of the no-hair theorem, which is a family of theorems, and holds under specific assumptions [20,22,56]. The spacetime around an astrophysical black hole is thought to be described well by the Kerr solution [40], where the compact object is specified by its mass M and spin angular momentum J while its electric charge vanishes. Our astrophysical systems are stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries or supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN) accreting from geometrically thin and optically thick accretion disks
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
