Joint Astrophysical Colloquium
Of Bubbles, Filaments, Echoes and Eruptions: First Results from eROSITA on SRG
Andrea Merloni (Max-Planck Institute fuer Extraterrestrische Physik (MPE))
Thursday 18/11/2021 @ 11:30, Remote talk
The next generation of wide-area, sensitive X-ray surveys designed to map the hot and energetic Universe has arrived, thanks to eROSITA (extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array), the core instrument on the Russian-German Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) mission. eROSITA high sensitivity, large field of view, high spatial resolution and survey efficiency is bound to revolutionise X-ray astronomy and deliver large legacy samples for many classes of astronomical objects in the energy range 0.2-8 keV. Over this energy range, telescopes are sensitive to the emission of millions of degrees hot gas, revealing, among others, the most massive collapsed structures of the Universe (clusters and groups of galaxies), the hot ISM of the Milky Way and the Supernova remnants that energise it, the atmospheres of neutron stars, the magnetic coronae of accretion discs around black holes. I will present an overview of the instrument capabilities, the current status of the mission, and a few selected early science results and the expectations for the survey program, which has completed last June the third of its eight planned charts of the whole sky. In particular, I will report on the discovery of hot gas in emission from the filaments connecting two clusters of galaxies, of large X-ray bubbles in the Milky Way halo, and of two new pulsating supermassive black holes.