Speaker
Prof.
A. Young
Description
Content: in the very innermost regions of accretion flows onto supermassive black holes the hot corona, located somewhere above the accretion disc, produces X-rays which illuminate the accretion disc. The back-scattered, “reflection”, spectrum contains spectral features that are affected by strong Doppler and relativistic effects close to the black hole, as well as “reverberation” echoes due to the light travel time between the corona and the disc. I will summarise the theoretical, numerical, and observational frameworks used to study these systems, and outline the limitations of standard models that we hope to address with TALES.
