The commissioning phase of the eROSITA X-ray telescope aboard the SRG spacecraft has just been completed. During this phase, all seven eROSITA cameras have been switched on individually, and demonstrated performance satisfying the mission requirements. As of Sunday 13 October 2019, all seven telescope modules are operating simultaneously, and eROSITA has entered full science operations, beginning with the calibration and performance verification (CalPV) phase. Early images and results from eROSITA will be presented at a “first light” symposium to be held at MPE in the afternoon of Tuesday October 22nd. Interested members of the media should contact Hannelore Hämmerle (see side column) for more details.
Green light for eROSITA telescopes: All seven cameras are operating within their nominal temperature and voltage ranges with their filters in position, and are processing data.
Green light for eROSITA telescopes: All seven cameras are operating within their nominal temperature and voltage ranges with their filters in position, and are processing data.
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)…
At today’s 16th Marcel Grossmann meeting, Dr. Peter Predehl accepted the Institutional Marcel Grossmann Award, which has been awarded to the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE). The institute receives the award jointly with the S.A. Lavochkin Association and the Space Research Institute (IKI) of the Russian Academy of Sciences…