Speaker
Description
X-ray reverberation lags probe the light travel time due to relativistic curvature effects in the reflected emission close to black holes, and can be used to measure properties of the accreting system, including the mass of the central compact object. Existing models for X-ray reverberation lags and relativistically blurred reflection spectra are, however, limited by their treatment of coronal geometry. New public time-averaged models have recently been developed and used to fit the reflection spectrum of an accretion disc illuminated by a ring-like corona. They show it is practically impossible to distinguish a lamppost from a class of geometrically extended coronae. The spectral-timing analog of these ring-like geometries, particularly for the X-ray reverberation lag, have been suspected to break this degeneracy, but are computationally prohibited by existing modelling methods. I will present a new public flavour of the Reltrans model that includes detailed calculations for X-ray reverberation from a ring-like corona in strong gravity, making use of novel computational techniques, and discuss general properties of how our simulations differ from a lamppost corona.