Mapping supermassive black holes with X-ray reverberation

17th American Astronomical Society HEAD Meeting, Monterey, CA (19/03/2019) — invited

From the reverberation of X-rays off the innermost regions the accretion disc, a three-dimensional picture is starting to emerge of the extreme environments around black holes; the structure of the disc and the corona that produces intense X-ray emission, as well of how the launching sites of jets may be connected to the corona and inner disc. Spectral timing analysis of accreting black holes, compared to the predictions of general relativistic ray tracing simulations, enables the structure of the corona and accretion disc to be mapped. We discover how the corona evolves on long and short timescales, giving rise to orders of magnitude variation in luminosity. X-ray reverberation studies are revealing, for the first time, structure within the corona including a persistent collimated core akin to the base of a jet, even in radio-quiet sources, alongside a second component associated with the accretion disc itself.This gives us important insight into the small-scale processes close to the event horizon that black holes to power some of the most luminous objects in the Universe, launch vast jets at close to the speed of light and play their important feedback role in the formation of structure in the Universe.