X-ray Astronomy group

Participation in large international collaborations and consortia

Athena/WFI Consortium: members of the Science Team that defines the science goals and technical requirements of the Wide Field Imager (WFI) of the Athena X-ray Observatory, currently the L2 mission of ESA. Participation in the ground segment team of the WFI instrument and involved in the development of routines for the detection of X-ray sources on the Athena/WFI images. The image on the right shows a simulated 500ks Athena/WFI observations of the Chandra Deep Field South (Credit: Athena Community Office).

eROSITA German Consortium: The eROSITA X-ray telescope on-board the Russian-German SRG (Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma) observatory scans the entire sky to provide the deepest All-Sky Survey at soft X-ray energies (0.2-2.6keV). We are developing routines for the source detection chain of the eROSITA Science Analysis Software System. Our group is also involved in the science exploitation of the eROSITA data by studying the statistical properties of the Active Galactic Nuclei found by eROSITA.

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XMM-XXL Survey Collaboration: The XMM-XXL is the largest contiguous X-ray survey carried out by the XMM-Newton X-ray telescope with a total invested time of over 6Ms. It consists of two extragalactic regions of 25deg2 down to a point-source sensitivity of ~ 5 10-15 erg/s/cm2 in the 0.5-2keV band. The main goal of the project is to constrain the Dark Energy equation of state using clusters of galaxies. This survey will also have lasting legacy value for cluster scaling laws and studies of AGNs and X-ray background. The group is involved in both the cosmological analysis of the data as well as the AGN science.