Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Joint Astrophysics Seminar

Spectroscopy of Black Hole Binaries in the Chandra and XMM-Newton Era

Jon Miller

University of Michigan

It is expected that the properties of black holes, and accretion onto black holes, should scale with mass. This expectation is something that dedicated observations can both exploit and attempt to test. Recent observations of stellar-mass black holes accreting in binary systems have revealed a number of remarkable similarities with supermassive black holes. In this talk, I will review recent results from Chandra and XMM-Newton observations of stellar-mass black holes (including the detection of relativistic disk lines, disk-driven winds, and the nature of accretion onto black holes at low accretion rates), comment on how these results affect our view of accretion onto supermassive black holes, and briefly discuss how this interplay can be employed in the future.