The Japanese-led XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) on Saturday released a first look at the data that scientists expect it to collect when science operations begin this year.
The mission team revealed an image of hundreds of galaxies and a spectrum of stellar wreckage in a nearby galaxy, which can tell scientists what they are made of.
“XRISM will provide the international science community with a new glimpse of the hidden X-ray sky. We’ll not only see X-ray images of these sources but also study their compositions, motions, and physical states,” said Richard Kelley, the US principal investigator for XRISM at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, via a statement.
In case you are wondering, XRISM is pronounced “crism,” and it is led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in collaboration with NASA and the European Space Agency. The space observatory is designed to detect X-ray radiation with energy up to 12,000 electron volts. To put that into context, the energy of visible light is between two to three electron volts. Therefore, it is designed to study the hottest regions in the universe, along with its largest structures and the objects with the strongest gravity.
XRISM is carrying just two instruments — Resolve and Xtend — and each of them focuses of the same X-ray Mirror assembly. Resolve is a microcalorimeter spectrometer, and it sits inside a refrigerator-sized container of liquid helium at a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. X-rays warm the device by an amount related to its energy. Scientists can use the measure of each individual X-ray’s energy to glean knowledge about the source.
The mission team used Resolve to study N132D, which is a supernova tenant and one of the brightest sources of X-rays in the Large Magellanic Cloud. That is a dwarf galaxy that is about 160,000 light-years away from us in the constellation Dorado. This expanding wreckage was created when a star around 15 times the Sun’s mass ran out of fuel, collapsed and exploded over 3,000 years ago.
Xtend, the mission’s second instrument, is an X-ray imager with a large field of view, able to observe an area about 60 per cent larger than the average apparent size of the full moon. Scientists used Xtend to capture an X-ray image of Abell 2319. That is a rich galaxy cluster that is about 770 million light-years away in the northern constellation Cygnus.
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First uploaded on: 06-01-2024 at 10:48 IST
