Next Generation Astronomical Survey to Map the Entire Sky
November 16, 2017
The next generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V) will move forward with mapping the entire sky following a $16 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The grant will kickstart a ground-breaking all-sky spectroscopic survey for a next wave of discovery, anticipated to start in 2020, just after the start of the all-sky survey by the MPE’s eROSITA X-ray telescope.
The start of the SDSS-V programme is an important milestone for the eROSITA team at MPE. With its high sensitivity, large field of view, and high survey efficiency, eROSITA on board SRG is bound to revolutionise X-ray astronomy. Within just the first twelve months of the its all-sky survey, due to begin in 2019, eROSITA will discover as many new X-ray celestial objects as are known today, combining all X-ray missions over more than 50 years of exploration.
SDSS-V will be the first world-class facility that will embark in a systematic, large-scale follow-up campaign of the eROSITA survey in a so-called “Black Hole Mapper”. Thanks to that effort, MPE scientists and members of the eROSITA consortium will be able to accurately measure redshift (and thus distance) for hundreds of thousands X-ray sources (mainly growing supermassive black holes and clusters of galaxies) newly discovered by eROSITA.
Odd radio circles (ORC), a recently identified new class of extended faint radio sources, have captivated the curiosity of astronomers worldwide. A groundbreaking discovery by a team led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics unveils the first detection of diffuse X-ray gas in the vicinity of the Cloverleaf ORC. Leveraging the…
The X-ray satellite “Einstein Probe” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) was launched successfully from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in China on a Long March-2C rocket on January 9th, 2024. Equipped with cutting-edge X-ray mirrors and detectors, with major contributions from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE)…
A new all-sky map by the eROSITA telescope reveals X-rays emitted by million-degree hot plasma in and around the Milky Way. Analysing this data, the team at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics found that the very hot, ionized gas shows a disk-like distribution similar to the stellar disk, possibly embedded in a much larger…
Researchers have observed the X-ray emission of the most luminous quasar seen in the last 9 billion years of cosmic history. Significant changes in the quasar’s emission give a new perspective on the inner workings of quasars and how they interact with their environment. The study was led by Dr Elias Kammoun, a postdoctoral researcher at the…
A white dwarf star can explode as a supernova when its mass exceeds the limit of about 1.4 solar masses. A team led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics has now found a binary star system in which matter flows onto the white dwarf from its companion. The system was found due to bright, so-called super-soft X-rays, which…
eROSITA telescope finds an X-ray bright, optically faint quasar accreting material at an extremely high rate only about 800 million years after the big bang
This year, one of the ORIGINS Cluster PhD awards goes to Riccardo Arcodia from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics for his excellent thesis. The ORIGINS PhD Awards were presented at a ceremony during the ORIGINS Science Week, which took place from November 28th to December 1st, 2022 at Seeon Monastery.
The IAU has awarded MPE junior scientist Riccardo Arcodia with a PhD prize for his thesis on “Accretion onto black holes across the mass scale”. Along with the other nine prizewinners, he will give a talk at the next IAU general assembly, taking place at the beginning of August in Busan, Republic of Korea.
When stars like our Sun use up all their fuel, they shrink to form white dwarfs. Sometimes such dead stars flare back to life in a super-hot explosion, called a “nova”, and produce a fireball of X-ray radiation. Using the eROSITA telescope on the SRG space observatory, a research team led by Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU)…