Exploring Strong Gravity with Accreting Black Holes
Abstract:
Gas falling onto black holes can radiate away of its rest mass energy, vastly exceeding the efficiency of nuclear fusion and powering the brightest persistent objects observed in the Universe. The photons Astronomers observe come from close to the black hole event horizon, so that the accretion process encodes information about gravity in the strong-field regime. These lectures will cover the evidence for the existence of black holes in the Universe, and the physics of the accretion process. We will discuss methods for learning about strong gravity from accreting black holes using X-rays as well as radio and infrared interferometry experiments that promise to make the first resolved images of gas in the immediate vicinity of an event horizon.