RELXILL_NK, a publicly available X-ray reflection model that includes non-Kerr black hole spacetimes, is presented and three of its flavors are compared using the Johannsen metric.
About the Kerr nature of the stellar-mass black hole in GRS 1915+105
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abstract
We employ the accretion disk reflection model RELXILL_NK to test the spacetime geometry around the stellar-mass black hole in GRS 1915+105. We adopt the Johannsen metric with the deformation parameters $\alpha_{13}$ and $\alpha_{22}$, for which the Kerr solution is recovered when $\alpha_{13} = \alpha_{22} = 0$. We analyze a NuSTAR observation of 2012, obtaining vanishing and non-vanishing values of the deformation parameters depending on the astrophysical model adopted. Similar difficulties were not found in our previous tests with other sources. The results of this work can shed light on the choice of sources suitable for testing the Kerr metric using X-ray reflection spectroscopy and on the parts of our reflection models that more urgently require improvement.
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gr-qc 1years
2019 1verdicts
CONDITIONAL 1representative citing papers
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RELXILL_NK: A Black Hole Relativistic Reflection Model for Testing General Relativity
RELXILL_NK, a publicly available X-ray reflection model that includes non-Kerr black hole spacetimes, is presented and three of its flavors are compared using the Johannsen metric.