Home Project Instruments Places People Papers Job Opportunities News Models Scientific Interests
Flows of hot plasma connecting the Milky Way center to the corona, halo and beyond
 
Instruments
 

The revolutionary eROSITA X-ray telescope
Almost 30 years after the high-impact ROSAT (soft) X-ray all-sky survey, a revolution is expected to be carried out thanks to the significantly deeper observations performed with eROSITA (Predehl 2012; Merloni et al. 2012). eROSITA is the primary X-ray instrument aboard the Russian Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma mission. eROSITA provides effective area and spectral resolution superior to those of XMM-Newton, as well as a significantly larger field of view of ∼1 square degree, resulting in a > 5 times larger grasp (Merloni et al. 2012). In the first four years after launch, it will perform eight deep scans of the entire X-ray sky, one each 6 months. When completed, the survey will be about 20 times more sensitive and have about 20 times better energy resolution than the ROSAT all-sky survey, in the soft X-ray band (0.3-2 keV).
This will enable the Hot Milk project to make significant advances in our understanding of the diffuse X-ray emission, thanks to sensitive all-sky maps at the energies of the various emission lines.
Additionally, eROSITA will provide the first-ever true imaging survey of the sky in the hard band (2-10 keV). Such sensitive all-sky surveys will shed new light on our view of the high-energy sky. The eROSITA all-sky X-ray maps and products will likely be unmatched for decades to come and will represent a legacy for astronomy, particularly in the evolving panorama of wide-area surveys at all wavelengths.

 

Video caption: This animation explains how eROSITA will fulfill its mission of scanning the whole sky in X-rays.
Credit: © High-Energy Astrophysics Group at MPE

The German eROSITA consortium
The German eROSITA consortium is composed of scientists affiliated with the 5 core institutions that planned, built and integrated the mission (the leading institute: Max Planck Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik; Leibniz-Institute für Astrophysics Postdam; University of Tübingen; Hamburg University; Erlangen-Nürnberg University/Bamberg observatory).
The Hot Milk project will be part and adhere to the rules of the German eROSITA consortium.
As a compensation for covering the costs of launching eROSITA, the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences has also access to the eROSITA data. To facilitate the division of the work and science return, the sky has been divided into hemispheres in Galactic coordinates, passing through the Galactic center.
More informations regarding eROSITA can be found here.

 

Image caption: A composition of artist’s impressions of the three mission NuSTAR (© NASA), XMM-Newton (© ESA) and CHANDRA (© NASA).

NuSTAR, XMM-Newton and Chandra
The Hot Milk project builds upon the XMM-Newton and Chandra legacy observations of the Galactic center. I expect that the eROSITA all sky maps will be instrumental to allow Hot Milk to tailor a series of deeper scans with XMM-Newton, Chandra and NuSTAR (of which I am member of the Galactic surveys science team)

 

Image caption: An artist’s impression of ASTRI Mini Array (© ASTRI).

ASTRI-Mini Array
The sensitive X-ray maps provided by eROSITA are expected to discover sources which emit in many different energy bands.
Hot Milk aims at exploiting this information and to complement our knowledge thanks to the use of multi-wavelength observations from radio to TeV energies. In particular, the Hot Milk project is part of the ASTRI-Mini Array team. A new array of Cherenkov telescopes (a pathfinder of the Cherenkov Telescope Array), which will expand our knowledge of the Universe at multi-tera electron Volts energies.


 
 
 

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
programme (grant agreement No. [865637])

  
  
Banner image: The central regions of our galaxy, the Milky Way, seen in X-rays by ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory - Date: 20 August 2015 - XMM-Newton Satellite - Copyright: ESA/XMM-Newton/G. Ponti et al. 2015 - Web site credit: G. Ponti - M.R. Panzera