Michal Bursa

email:
phone: +420 267 103 064

Michal Bursa investigates effects of strong gravity on the X-ray variability of compact objects and possible ways of inferring the mass and spin of black-hole sources from their X-ray emision lightcurves. His interests also include numerical simulations and ray-tracing in curved spacetimes.

Time variability of the X-ray emission of compact objects is affected by several relativistic effects including aberation, Doppler shift and light bending. Close to the central mass, in the regime of super-strong gravity, light does not propagate along straight lines, but photon trajectories are being substantionaly curved. Light bending is solely a general relativistic effect that can amplify emisivity changes due to variations in the accretion flow geomery. Most likely it can reveal periodic variability connected to the orbital motion in the very inner parts of the accretion disks, which can be then used to deduce properties of the central gravitating object.