The Science Program Committee of the European Space Agency (ESA) selected the “The Hot and Energetic Universe” as the science theme for its next Large (L-class) mission at its meeting in Paris.
The mission is expected to be launched in 2028, with the power to address some of the most fundamental questions in modern astrophysics.
The science theme was proposed by an international collaboration led by Kirpal Nandra, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Germany, with major inputs from the Universities of Leicester and Cambridge in the UK.
The same team is now well placed to lead the delivery of a major space observatory, with observing capabilities ideally matched to the L2 theme.
With the L2 selection ESA have ensured that astronomers worldwide will have access in the future to X-ray observations matching those becoming available at other wavelengths, in particular from NASA’S James Webb Telescope (successor to Hubble), and major new ground-based optical and radio telescopes such as ALMA and SKA.
ESA has already established a leading position in X-ray astronomy, with the highly successful XMM-Newton observatory about to begin its 15th year in orbit, having already yielded over 3500 scientific publications, reporting many discoveries and improved understanding on a wide range of astrophysical phenomena.
The enormous scope for the L2 mission, with an order of magnitude greater photon grasp and 100 times better spectral resolution than XMM, is underlined by the recently published 3XMM source catalogue containing over 375,000 cosmic X-ray sources.
Hot gas in the universe is the dominant form of ordinary matter, the same material that everything we see around us is made from. The hot gas forms the largest structures in the visible universe, aggregated around clusters of galaxies. With temperatures of more than a million degrees, the gas emits copiously at X-ray wavelengths.
With the new mission, astronomers will measure the properties of galaxy clusters in the distant universe, and map the physical characteristics of the largest structures known-information dramatically advancing our understanding of how these structures first assembled when the universe was just two billion years old.
Mapping the motion, temperature and chemical composition of the hot gas and tracking it through cosmic time are crucial to understanding the evolution of the galaxies and stars we see today. (ANI)