Black hole astrophysics through timing studies

“尽管经过了50年的研究，吸积黑洞仍有许多谜团。大多数星系太小，距离太远，无法直接成像，因此，为了理解这些星系的物理性质，我们必须依靠我们从它们发出的光的亮度变化和能谱中所能了解到的东西。在这个项目中，我们将开发和测试分析和解释黑洞亮度变化模式的新方法——包括我们银河系中的恒星质量黑洞（见图）和活动星系核中的超大质量黑洞。我们将重点关注来自光学和x射线天文台的数据，并研究从毫秒到几年不等的时间尺度上的变化。由于数据的局限性，从这些数据中提取最有用的信息提出了一些有趣的分析挑战，这些数据通常是嘈杂的，观测的时间可能相当不规则，通常来自不同的仪器。我们开发的方法将在面临类似挑战的天体物理学以外的领域得到应用。这个项目可能会对任何热衷于研究吸积黑洞的天体物理学和对新兴数据科学领域感兴趣的人感兴趣。

"Accreting black holes hold many mysteries despite five decades of study. Most are far too small and distant to image directly, and so to understand the physics of such systems we must rely on what we can learn from the variations in brightness and the energy spectrum of the light they emit. In this project we will develop and test new methods for analysing and interpreting the patterns contained in the brightness variations of black holes - both stellar-mass black holes in our Galaxy (see image) and super-massive black holes in Active Galactic Nuclei. We will focus on data from optical and X-ray observatories, and study variations over a range of timescales from milliseconds to years. Extracting the most useful information from such data poses some interesting analysis challenges due to the limitations of the data, which are often noisy and the timing of observations may be quite irregular, often with data coming from different instruments. The methods we develop will have applications in fields outside of astrophysics faced with similar challenges. This project may be of interest to anyone keen to investigate the astrophysics of accreting black holes and with an interest in the emerging field of data science.