Michael Parker

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that the X-ray bright active galactic nuclei (AGN) and galactic black hole binaries (BHB) are hot and radiatively compact, lying close to the boundary of the region in the compactness-temperature (Θ − l) diagram.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors calculate the reflection fraction in the lamp post geometry in order to determine its maximal possible value for a given value of black hole spin, and they show that high reflection fractions in excess of 2 are only possible for rapidly rotating black holes, suggesting that the high spin sources produce the strongest relativistic reflection features.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider higher densities in the calculation of the reflected spectrum and show that high-density effects significantly modify reflection spectra and the main effect is to boost the thermal continuum at energies 2 approximately less than keV.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used a relativistic blurring model to constrain the spin of the black hole binary Cygnus X-1 and obtained a spectral fit of 0.83 for all models that provide a good description of the spectrum.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present 3-50keV NuSTAR observations of the active galactic nuclei Mrk 335 in a very low flux state and find that the spectra can be well fitted with relativistic reflection, and that the lowest flux state spectrum is described by reflection alone, suggesting the effects of extreme light bending occurring within ∼2 gravitational radii (RG) of the event horizon.