Super-Massive Black Hole mass estimation from bright flares

Abstract

Super-Massive Black Holes reside in galactic nuclei, where they exhibit episodic bright flares due to accretion events. Taking into account relativistic effects, namely, the boosting and lensing of X-ray flares, we further examine the possibility to constraint the mass of the SMBH from the predicted profiles of the observed light curves. To this end, we have studied four bright flares from Sagittarius A*, which exhibit an asymmetric shape consistent with a combination of two intrinsically separate peaks that occur with a specific time delay with respect to each other. We have thus proposed (Karssen et al. 2017, Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 472, 4422) that an interplay of relativistic effects could be responsible for the shape of the observed light curves and we tested the reliability of the method.