X-ray reverberation around accreting black holes

By P. Uttley, E. Cackett, A. C. Fabian, E. Kara, D. Wilkins. 2014

333 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Luminous accreting stellar mass and supermassive black holes produce power–law continuum X-ray emission from a compact central corona. Reverberation time lags occur due to light travel time delays between changes in the direct coronal emission and corresponding variations in its reflection from the accretion flow. Reverberation is detectable using light curves made in different X-ray energy bands, since the direct and reflected components have different spectral shapes. Larger, lower frequency, lags are also seen and are identified with propagation of fluctuations through the accretion flow and associated corona. We review the evidence for X-ray reverberation in active galactic nuclei and black hole X-ray binaries, showing how it can be best measured and how it may be modelled. The timescales and energy dependence of the high-frequency reverberation lags show that much of the signal is originating from very close to the black hole in some objects, within a few gravitational radii of the event horizon. We consider how these signals can be studied in the future to carry out X-ray reverberation mapping of the regions closest to black holes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/91062c304778fdbc15a5d1885deee0bc6eb8e5dc

How researchers see this paper

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. A. C. Fabian
2. C. Reynolds
3. Cosimo Bambi
4. C. Done
5. T. Dauser
6. Ramesh Narayan
7. P. Uttley
8. E. Kara

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. A. C. Fabian
2. Cosimo Bambi
3. C. Reynolds
4. T. Dauser
5. E. Cackett
6. E. Kara
7. C. Done
8. P. Uttley

Citations in the corpus

• The role of the reflection fraction in constraining black hole spin (2014, background): “…measurements of high-frequency Fe-K reverberation strongly support the reflection origin of these broadened features (see, e.g., Kara et al. 2013; Uttley et al. 2014), the spectrum alone can generally be also described by partial covering an ionized absorber (see, e.g., Miller, Turner & Reeves…”
• Testing black hole candidates with electromagnetic radiation (2015, background): “For a review, see e.g. Uttley et al. (2014).”
• A global look at X-ray time lags in seyfert galaxies (2016, methodology): “To compute the time lags, we used the Fourier technique outlined in Nowak et al. (1999), and presented in detail in Uttley et al. (2014).”
• A quasi-periodic modulation of the iron line centroid energy in the black hole binary H1743−322 (2016, methodology): “The XMM–Newton power spectra are calculated in the standard way, with a constant Poisson noise level subtracted (van der Klis 1989; Uttley et al. 2014).”