Event
A New X-IFU has arrived! From 29 November to 1st December, 186 women and men gathered online for the 15th X-IFU Consortium Meeting. The Consortium meeting was focused on the reformulation activities of X-IFU. Those activities aim at simplifying the instrument, so that those simplifications will enable a significant reduction of the mission cost to ESA. ESA, […]
Newsletter
Welcome to the 22nd issue of the X-IFU Gazette! In this issue, the X-IFU Project Manager, Vincent Albouys, gives us some important information about the Instrument System Requirement Review. The project team prepared an extensive documentation data pack delivered in May to ESA. In December 2021, the first X-ray detection at IRAP was achieved. François […]
Science
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 […]
Science
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 […]
Newsletter
Welcome to the 21st issue of the X-IFU Gazette! 2022 is an important year for the X-IFU, and we are starting strong with the preparation of the Instrument System Requirement Review. Didier Barret, our Principal Investigator, gives us an overview of the upcoming milestones, including some information about the next Consortium Meeting that will be […]
Science
All the galaxies in the Universe host a supermassive black hole of unknown origin at their center and the mass of the black hole…
Outreach
Today, on 11 February, we celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. For this occasion, the X-IFU Consortium teamed up with the Athena Community Office, the XMM2Athena project, the WFI Consortium, and the AHEAD2020 project to highlight the contributions of women to astronomy with a call for AstroSciKu. An AstroSciku is an […]
Event
We are pleased to announce the first edition of the Athena School: “The Universe in the era of spatially resolved, high-resolution, X-ray spectroscopy”. This CNRS thematic school will be held from the 20th to the 24th of June 2022 in Toulouse, France. It is open to the whole French astronomical community, regardless of prior experience […]
Outreach
The X-IFU Consortium is joining the celebrations for the International Day of Girls and Women in Science on 11 February to show the contributions of women to science and, in particular, to the field of astronomy and astrophysics. This year, we present a joint international initiative of the X-IFU Consortium, the Athena Community Office, the […]