Accurate Modelling of Relativistic Iron Lines from Accretion Discs

Abstract

Observations of fluorescent iron lines from accreting black holes provide one of the best tests of strong field gravity available to date, and the only current observational tool to probe black hole spacetime. However, the two most widely used models for spectral fitting (diskline, laor) are over a decade old and have significant limitations. We present a new code for calculating these effects which will be incorporated within the XSPEC package