Abstract
In this article, I will attempt to give an overview of the motivations for studying black holes and of the current major problems in the field. I will also give some perspectives on what can be done in the future, focusing on instrumentation which has already been approved. This chapter will necessarily be more speculative than the other chapters in this volume.
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Notes
On the other hand, it should also be noted that the maximum mass of a neutron star is far more sensitive to whether general relativity properly describes gravity than is anything measureable from black hole accretion disks (see e.g. Psaltis 2008).
Although it is worth noting that some reasonable attempts have been made to identify surface effects from neutron stars which are prominent enough that absence of them would be evidence of absence of a surface.
With the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, for many sources, including the Crab, acceptable fits in χ 2 terms can be found with relatively simple spectral models, with the systematic errors added to the data being no more than 1 %. This is suggestive of the calibration being good to about 1 %, but still runs into questions about how well the Crab spectrum is really known.
Some groups do debate whether this change happens exactly at the transition to the hard state, or at a somewhat lower fraction of the Eddington luminosity (e.g. Rykoff et al. 2007), but not whether this effect happens at all.
The improvement for the new concept Athena+ would be a factor of about 5 in effective area over XMM-Newton
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the organizers and the participants of the workshop for an interesting program.
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Maccarone, T.J. Black Hole Studies: Overview and Outlook. Space Sci Rev 183, 477–489 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-013-0026-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-013-0026-2