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As a part of my assessment in school, I will determine the mass of a black hole from the x-ray data (not necessarily but I think x-ray is preferred in astronomy as well, I am open to recommendations) from an open-source database (Chandra, XMM-Newton...) and use Fourier transformation in order to determine the mass of any black hole.

I am not sure where and how to start and how to go. It would be great if you could show me the pathway I should follow and I will fill the gaps by doing research myself.

p.s.: first time using stack exchange please let me know if I am doing something wrong.

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  • $\begingroup$ Regarding your "p.s.", after allowing some time for answers to come in, you accept the one you like most, and it gets a green check mark and the answerer gets his/her 15 points. If it's left at 0, he or she may feel unappreciated, esp. if it's a banger of an answer. $\endgroup$
    – JEB
    Commented Sep 23 at 16:00

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So you have a time series of X-ray brightness? I would FT that and look for the highest frequency, $f_{max}$ above the noise floor, and assume that:

$$ \frac 1 f_{max} \propto \frac{2R_{min}} c $$

Where $R_{min}$ is the minimum radius of observable matter--that is: it's the Schwarzschild radius.

Then mass is readily available.

See: Interpretation of fourier transform of a specific time serie

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