This textbook introduces the current astrophysical observations of black holes, and discusses the leading techniques to study the strong gravity region around these objects with electromagnetic radiation. More importantly, it provides the basic tools for writing an astrophysical code and testing the Kerr paradigm. Astrophysical black holes are an ideal laboratory for testing strong gravity. According to general relativity, the spacetime geometry around these objects should be well described by the Kerr solution. The electromagnetic radiation emitted by the gas in the inner part of the accretion disk can probe the metric of the strong gravity region and test the Kerr black hole hypothesis. With exercises and examples in each chapter, as well as calculations and analytical details in the appendix, the book is especially useful to the beginners or graduate students who are familiar with general relativity while they do not have any background in astronomy or astrophysics.<

Provides the mathematical tools to compute some key-features in the X-ray spectrum of black holes Contains calculations and analytical details in the appendix Offers exercises and examples for students to learn by doing Discusses the leading techniques to probe the strong gravitational field near black holes Serves as both a study text for graduate students or beginners, as well as a reference work for researchers in the field Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext
Cosimo Bambi is Professor at the Department of Physics of Fudan University. He received the PhD from Ferrara University (Italy) in 2007. He was a postdoc at Wayne State University (Michigan), at IPMU at The University of Tokyo (Japan), in the group of Prof. Dvali at LMU Munich (Germany). He moved to Fudan University at the end of 2012 under the Thousand Young Talents Program. His research interests cover several areas in gravity, cosmology, and high energy astrophysics. He has published over 80 research papers in refereed journals and 2 review papers. He authored one textbook, and edited one volume (in ASSL) with Springer.

Inhalt

Introduction.- Black Hole Solutions.- Motion around Black Holes.- Astrophysical Black Holes.- Thin Accretion Disks.- Thermal Spectrum of Thin Disks.- Relativistic Iron Line.- Quasi-Periodic Oscillations.- Parametrization of the Background Metric.- Observational Constraints.