The Russian-German Space Observatory Spektr-RG has completed the first-ever all-sky hard X-ray survey, the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences said.
"We have made it – the ART-XC telescope of the Spektr-RG observatory has completed its first all-sky survey! As we have predicted, it took almost a half of the year, during which the telescope was permanently monitoring the sky in hard X-rays", the institute said on Wednesday.
The telescope has been scanning the celestial sphere in hard X-rays from 8 December 2019 till 10 June 2020, the institute's news release reads. The observatory has registered all space events in the energy range 4-12 kiloelectron volt (keV).
The institute said that the all-sky map with a similar resolution had been created by the German observatory ROSAT in soft X-rays 30 years ago. Other sky hard X-ray maps have a much worse resolution that the map prepared by Spektr-RG.
The Spektr-RG mission is a joint project between Roscosmos and the German space agency DLR. Spektr-RG was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 13 July 2019.
For the next four years, the telescope is expected to perform eight all-sky surveys to map X-rays sources in the universe with unprecedented detail.
X-ray telescopes are used for photographing distant objects of the universe, such as clusters of galaxies, active galactic nuclei, supernova remnants, and x-ray binary stars. The difficulty of observation in the x-ray range is that the telescope must be raised above the atmosphere of the earth, opaque to x-rays.
