Reflecting on naked singularities: iron line fitting as a probe of the cosmic censorship conjecture

Abstract

ABSTRACT We demonstrate that the X-ray iron line fitting technique can be leveraged as a powerful probe of the cosmic censorship conjecture. We do this by extending existing emission line models to arbitrary spin parameters of the Kerr metric, no longer restricted to black hole metrics with |a•| < 1. We show that the emission lines from naked singularity metrics (|a•| > 1) show significant differences to their black hole counterparts, even for those metrics with identical locations of the innermost stable circular orbit, i.e. emission line fitting does not suffer from the degeneracy which affects continuum fitting approaches. These differences are entirely attributable to the disappearance of the event horizon for |a•| > 1. We highlight some novel emission line features of naked singularity metrics, such as ‘inverted’ emission lines (with sharp red wings and extended blue wings) and ‘triple lines’. The lack of detection of any of these novel features provides support of the cosmic censorship conjecture. We publicly release xspec packages skline and skconv which can now be used to probe the cosmic censorship conjecture in Galactic X-ray binaries and active galactic nuclei. The inclusion of super-extremal space–times can be alternatively posed as a way of stress testing conventional models of accretion.