Testing the Kerr black hole hypothesis with RELXILLNK
Abstract
Astrophysical black hole candidates are thought to be the Kerr black holes of general relativity. However, macroscopic deviations from the Kerr background are predicted by a number of scenarios beyond Einstein's gravity. X-ray reflection spectroscopy can be a powerful tool to probe the strong gravity region of these objects and test the Kerr black hole hypothesis. Here I briefly review the state of the art of this line of research and I present some constraints on possible deviations from the Kerr metric obtained with the new X-ray reflection model relxillnk and XMM-Newton, NuSTAR, and Swift data of the supermassive black hole in 1H0707-495.
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