Abstract
I review the current status of X-ray reflection (a.k.a. broad iron line) based black hole spin measurements. This is a powerful technique that allows us to measure robust black hole spins across the mass range, from the stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries to the supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei. After describing the basic assumptions of this approach, I lay out the detailed methodology focusing on “best practices” that have been found necessary to obtain robust results. Reflecting my own biases, this review is slanted towards a discussion of supermassive black hole (SMBH) spin in active galactic nuclei (AGN). Pulling together all of the available XMM-Newton and Suzaku results from the literature that satisfy objective quality control criteria, it is clear that a large fraction of SMBHs are rapidly-spinning, although there are tentative hints of a more slowly spinning population at high (M>5×107 M ⊙) and low (M<2×106 M ⊙) mass. I also engage in a brief review of the spins of stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries. In general, reflection-based and continuum-fitting based spin measures are in agreement, although there remain two objects (GRO J1655–40 and 4U 1543–475) for which that is not true. I end this review by discussing the exciting frontier of relativistic reverberation, particularly the discovery of broad iron line reverberation in XMM-Newton data for the Seyfert galaxies NGC 4151, NGC 7314 and MCG–5-23-16. As well as confirming the basic paradigm of relativistic disk reflection, this detection of reverberation demonstrates that future large-area X-ray observatories such as LOFT will make tremendous progress in studies of strong gravity using relativistic reverberation in AGN.
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Notes
In the lamp-post geometry, the X-ray source is situated at some height above the disk plane on the spin-axis of the black hole.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Andy Fabian, Anne Lohfink, Jon Miller and Abdu Zoghbi for invaluable discussion during the writing of this review. I gratefully acknowledge support from NASA under ADAP grant NNX12AE13G.
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Reynolds, C.S. Measuring Black Hole Spin Using X-Ray Reflection Spectroscopy. Space Sci Rev 183, 277–294 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-013-0006-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-013-0006-6