Towards precision tests of general relativity with black hole X-ray reflection spectroscopy

Understand

Astrophysical black hole systems are the ideal laboratories for testing Einstein's theory of gravity in the strong field regime.

• We have recently developed a framework which uses the reflection spectrum of black hole systems to perform precision tests of general relativity by testing the Kerr black hole hypothesis.
• In this paper, we analyze XMM-Newton and NuSTAR observations of the supermassive black hole in the Seyfert 1 galaxy MCG-06-30-15 with our disk reflection model.
• We consider the Johannsen metric with the deformation parameters $\alpha_{13}$ and $\alpha_{22}$, which quantify deviations from the Kerr metric.