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Athena: the X-ray observatory to study the hot and energetic Universe

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conference contribution
posted on 2016-01-27, 11:17 authored by X. Barcons, K. Nandra, D. Barret, J-W. den Herder, A. C. Fabian, L. Piro, Michael Geoffrey Watson
Hot gas pervades the Universe: about half of the baryonic content in the Universe is expected to be at T > 105 K, and there are as many baryons at T > 107 trapped in galaxy clusters as there are locked into stars. There is an intimate relation between this hot gas, which delineates the large-scale structure of the Universe, and the most energetic phenomena occurring in the immediate vicinity of super-massive black holes, through a poorly known process called Cosmic Feedback. Studying the hot and energetic universe requires X-ray observatories in space, whose capabilities greatly exceed those of the current workhorse observatories: NASA's Chandra and ESA's XMM- Newton. Athena has been selected by ESA as the L2 mission (due for launch in 2028), to address the "Hot and Energetic Universe" science theme. It will be a large X-ray observatory capable of addressing the above topics, and many other fundamental questions in contemporary astrophysics. Here we present the Athena science objectives, the mission concept and its payload, including the X-ray telescope and its two baseline instruments: a Wide Field Imager (WFI) and an X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU).

History

Citation

Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2015, 610(1), 012008

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING/Department of Physics and Astronomy

Source

10th International LISA Symposium, Univ Florida, Gainesville, FL

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Published in

Journal of Physics: Conference Series

Publisher

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

issn

1742-6588

eissn

1742-6596

Copyright date

2015

Available date

2016-01-27

Publisher version

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/610/1/012008/

Temporal coverage: start date

2014-05-18

Temporal coverage: end date

2014-05-23

Language

en

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