Using iron line reverberation and spectroscopy to distinguish Kerr and non-Kerr black holes
- Center for Field Theory and Particle Physics and Department of Physics, Fudan University, 220 Handan Road, 200433 Shanghai (China)
The iron Kα line commonly observed in the X-ray spectrum of both stellar-mass and supermassive black hole candidates is produced by the illumination of a cold accretion disk by a hot corona. In this framework, the activation of a new flaring region in the hot corona imprints a time variation on the iron line spectrum. Future X-ray facilities with high time resolution and large effective areas may be able to measure the so-called 2-dimensional transfer function; that is, the iron line profile detected by a distant observer as a function of time in response to an instantaneous flare from the X-ray primary source. This work is a preliminary study to determine if and how such a technique can provide more information about the spacetime geometry around the compact object than the already possible measurements of the time-integrated iron line profile. Within our simplified model, we find that a measurement of iron line reverberation can improve constraints appreciably given a sufficiently strong signal, though that most of the information is present in the time-integrated spectrum. Our aim is to test the Kerr metric. We find that current X-ray facilities and data are unable to provide strong tests of the Kerr nature of supermassive black hole candidates. We consider an optimistic case of 10{sup 5} iron line photons from a next-generation data set. With such data, the reverberation model improves upon the spectral constraint by an order of magnitude.
- OSTI ID:
- 22525836
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2015, Issue 05; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1475-7516
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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