According to academician Rashid Syunyaev, today this is a recordMOSCOW, December 19.
/tass/. The Russian-European orbital observatory Spektr-RG has detected over 23 thousand galaxy clusters among 1.5 million X-ray sources discovered by the eROSITA telescope during four full and one incomplete sky surveys. This value is a record, Academician Rashid Syunyaev, scientific director of the Russian part of the Spektr-RG mission, said on Monday.
"Within the framework of four complete and one incomplete sky survey, we managed to detect more than 1.5 million X-ray sources, including 23 thousand galaxy clusters, in the half of the night sky that is Russian within the mission. This is a record for today," Syunyaev said at the conference "High Energy Astrophysics Today and Tomorrow" (HEA-2022), held this week at the ICI RAS.
As the academician noted, so far scientists have managed to establish distances only up to 140 thousand from 1.5 million sources discovered by the eROSITA telescope, the German half of the observatory. To determine the distances and study all the properties of other objects, the SRG-z project was created, in which Russian astronomers and their foreign colleagues systematically study these sources of X-ray waves using ground-based telescopes.
Of particular interest, as noted by Syunyaev, are seven dozen bursts of X-ray waves, presumably recorded by Spectrum-RG at the time of the destruction of stars by the attraction of supermassive black holes in distant galaxies. Determining the position and studying these objects will reveal the history of interactions between black holes and luminaries in the early and modern universe.
A new age of X-ray astronomy
Spectrum-RG is a joint Russian-German project. The observatory will scan the sky in a wide energy range with high sensitivity and angular resolution. It was launched into space two years ago, and at the end of October 2019, it successfully reached a working orbit located at the L2 point, where the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Sun are balanced.
This is the second device from the Spectra line, which should take the place of the Spectrum-R (its mission was completed at the end of May last year) in the status of the only Russian scientific and space project. It has two X-ray telescopes on board: the Russian ART-XC and the German eROSITA. It was planned to launch such an observatory since 1987.
The first survey of the sky was successfully prepared by the instruments of "Spectrum-RG" in the middle of last summer. Astronomers have managed to detect over a million galaxies and other objects radiating in X-rays in the night sky, the vast majority of which were previously unknown to scientists. The work of the German part of the observatory was discontinued in the spring, the eROSITA telescope was put into inactive mode by the European side.
