Testing general relativity with the reflection spectrum of the supermassive black hole in 1H0707$-$495
arXiv:1709.00219 · 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.
10 pages, 7 figures. v2: refereed version