Testing General Relativity with the Reflection Spectrum of the Supermassive Black Hole in 1H0707-495

Zheng Cao; Sourabh Nampalliwar; Cosimo Bambi; Thomas Dauser; Javier A García

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.051101

Testing General Relativity with the Reflection Spectrum of the Supermassive Black Hole in 1H0707-495

Phys Rev Lett. 2018 Feb 2;120(5):051101. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.051101.

Authors

Zheng Cao¹, Sourabh Nampalliwar^{1

2}, Cosimo Bambi^{1

2}, Thomas Dauser³, Javier A García^{3

4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Center for Field Theory and Particle Physics and Department of Physics, Fudan University, 200433 Shanghai, China.
² Theoretical Astrophysics, Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
³ Remeis Observatory and ECAP, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 96049 Bamberg, Germany.
⁴ Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA.
⁵ Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.

PMID: 29481156
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.051101

Abstract

Recently, we have extended the x-ray reflection model relxill to test the spacetime metric in the strong gravitational field of astrophysical black holes. In the present Letter, we employ this extended model to analyze XMM-Newton, NuSTAR, and Swift data of the supermassive black hole in 1H0707-495 and test deviations from a Kerr metric parametrized by the Johannsen deformation parameter α_{13}. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the spacetime metric around the black hole in 1H0707-495 is described by the Kerr solution.