Go-ahead for Athena
On Wednesday November 8, 2023, ESA’s Science Programme Committee (SPC) formally and unanimously approved the restart of industrial studies for the Athena mission, still considered as a flagship mission.
Science
The New X-IFU Configuration
Following the necessity to bring the ESA Cost at Completion below €1.3 billion, the Athena mission and the X-IFU have entered a reformulation phase in 2022.
Investigating the building blocks of the Universe in X-rays
Image credit: © ESO The astronomer Carl Sagan once said: “We are made of stardust”. This is, to a large extent, true. The building blocks of our planet and all the living creatures are made of elements, as for example carbon, oxygen and iron, that are forged during the star cycle. The last phases of […]
Detecting X-rays at IRAP
The test platform developed by IRAP and CNES in Toulouse is a key element of the demonstration of the detection chain electronics developed in France for the Athena X-IFU. Within this platform, prototypes of flight electronics will be included in an end-to-end detection chain covering from the transition-edge sensor (TES) microcalorimeters to the X-IFU data […]
Investigating outflowing gas around Supermassive black holes
All the galaxies in the Universe host a supermassive black hole of unknown origin at their center and the mass of the black hole…
Witnessing the assembly of clusters of galaxies with the X-IFU
Clusters of galaxies are the largest bound astrophysical objects in the Universe. Located at the nodes of the cosmic web, they are huge gravitational potential wells of masses about 100 to 1000 trillion times that of the Sun, filled with around 85% of dark matter and 15% of ordinary (baryonic) matter. The latter is for […]
Studying X-ray eclipses in active galactic nuclei with X-IFU
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are bright compact regions located at the centres of some galaxies. These objects are powered by the accretion of gas, through a disc, onto a supermassive black hole (~105-109 Msun) . The accretion disc emits the bulk of its light in the ultraviolet/optical range. The disc photons will then be Compton […]
Bringing Athena compliant with the 7 keV effective area requirement
The Athena mirror will use an innovative technology called Silicon Pore Optics (SPO). The technology, combined with appropriate over coating, holds great potential to meet the Athena performance requirements in terms of effective area. The SPO have to match several top-level performance requirements. The most driving ones are the angular resolution and the effective area. […]
The potential of the X-IFU for studies of the solar system
It was just over 40 years ago when Jupiter’s X-ray aurora was discovered with the Einstein Observatory. Since then, we have come an exceptionally long way in exploring the solar system in X-rays, with XMM-Newton and Chandra playing a major role over the last 20 years. Since 2016 and the arrival of JUNO at Jupiter, […]