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.
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)
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