Guglielmo Mastroserio (Università Statale di Milano) - Italy, December 11, 2023

Astrophysical black holes are some of the most extreme and fascinating objects in the universe. However, studying these systems poses difficult challenges since they swallow everything that comes close to them, including light. Fortunately, these objects leave their traces imposing their extreme gravitational pull on the surrounding matter, while it is falling into the black hole. Combining the analysis of X-ray spectral and timing features produced from the innermost region of accreting black holes allows us to characterize the properties of the black hole, such as its mass and spin, and to infer the geometrical structure of the surrounding matter. I will overview the most recent results derived from the spectral-timing analysis of these systems. In particular, I will focus on the results obtained modeling X-ray reverberation features that have been observed in stellar-mass black holes and on the open questions that we are still facing.

About myself
I’m currently a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Milan, where I started in September. The University of Milan is also where I started studying physics. I did my thesis in collaboration with the Osservatiorio Astronomico di Brera-Merate. Then I moved to the University of Amsterdam for my PhD working with Michiel van der Klis and Adam Ingram on modeling spectral-timing features of accreting black holes. After I graduated I spent three years at Caltech as a postdoc in the group responsible for the NuSTAR X-ray telescope. Before joining my current group in Milan, I spent one year at the Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari working with Matteo Bachetti on developing software for X-ray data analysis.