Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Joint Astrophysics Seminar

Accretion Disks and Black Hole Spin

Omer Blaes

UC Santa Barbara

Astrophysical black hole spacetimes are characterized by just two parameters: mass and spin. Masses of many black holes are now very well-measured, and people are now trying to determine their spins. I will discuss some of the techniques used in black hole X-ray binaries and show how they may also be used to constrain the complex physics of the accretion flow.