0000000000277285
AUTHOR
Etienne Pointecouteau
showing 8 related works from this author
The Athena X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU)
2016
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2016, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Testing the X-IFU calibration requirements: an example for quantum efficiency and energy resolution
2018
With its array of 3840 Transition Edge Sensors (TESs) operated at 90 mK, the X-Ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) on board the ESA L2 mission Athena will provide spatially resolved high-resolution spectroscopy (2.5 eV FWHM up to 7 keV) over the 0.2 to 12 keV bandpass. The in-flight performance of the X-IFU will be strongly affected by the calibration of the instrument. Uncertainties in the knowledge of the overall system, from the filter transmission to the energy scale, may introduce systematic errors in the data, which could potentially compromise science objectives - notably those involving line characterisation e.g. turbulence velocity measurements - if not properly accounted for. Defining…
Non-thermal pressure support in X-COP galaxy clusters
2018
Galaxy clusters are the endpoints of structure formation and are continuously growing through the merging and accretion of smaller structures. Numerical simulations predict that a fraction of their energy content is not yet thermalized, mainly in the form of kinetic motions (turbulence, bulk motions). Measuring the level of non-thermal pressure support is necessary to understand the processes leading to the virialization of the gas within the potential well of the main halo and to calibrate the biases in hydrostatic mass estimates. We present high-quality measurements of hydrostatic masses and intracluster gas fraction out to the virial radius for a sample of 12 nearby clusters with availab…
The XMM Cluster Outskirts Project (X-COP): Thermodynamic properties of the Intracluster Medium out to $R_{200}$ in Abell 2319
2018
We present the joint analysis of the X-ray and SZ signals in A2319, the galaxy cluster with the highest signal-to-noise ratio in Planck maps and that has been surveyed within our XMM Cluster Outskirts Project (X-COP). We recover the thermodynamical profiles by the geometrical deprojection of the X-ray surface brightness, of the SZ comptonization parameter, and an accurate and robust spectroscopic measurements of the temperature. We resolve the clumpiness of the density to be below 20 per cent demonstrating that most of this clumpiness originates from the ongoing merger and can be associated to large-scale inhomogeneities. This analysis is done in azimuthally averaged radial bins and in eigh…
The Athena X-ray Integral Field Unit: a consolidated design for the system requirement review of the preliminary definition phase
2023
The Athena X-ray Integral Unit (X-IFU) is the high resolution X-ray spectrometer, studied since 2015 for flying in the mid-30s on the Athena space X-ray Observatory, a versatile observatory designed to address the Hot and Energetic Universe science theme, selected in November 2013 by the Survey Science Committee. Based on a large format array of Transition Edge Sensors (TES), it aims to provide spatially resolved X-ray spectroscopy, with a spectral resolution of 2.5 eV (up to 7 keV) over an hexagonal field of view of 5 arc minutes (equivalent diameter). The X-IFU entered its System Requirement Review (SRR) in June 2022, at about the same time when ESA called for an overall X-IFU redesign (i…
The X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) for Athena
2014
Athena is designed to implement the Hot and Energetic Universe science theme selected by the European Space Agency for the second large mission of its Cosmic Vision program. The Athena science payload consists of a large aperture high angular resolution X-ray optics (2 m2 at 1 keV) and twelve meters away, two interchangeable focal plane instruments: the X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) and the Wide Field Imager. The X-IFU is a cryogenic X-ray spectrometer, based on a large array of Transition Edge Sensors (TES), oering 2.5 eV spectral resolution, with approximately 5" pixels, over a field of view of 5' in diameter. In this paper, we present the X-IFU detector and readout electronics princi…
Universal thermodynamic properties of the intracluster medium over two decades in radius in the X-COP sample
2018
The hot plasma in galaxy clusters is expected to be heated to high temperatures through shocks and adiabatic compression. The thermodynamical properties of the gas encode information on the processes leading to the thermalization of the gas in the cluster's potential well as well as non-gravitational processes such as gas cooling, AGN feedback and kinetic energy. In this work we present the radial profiles of the thermodynamic properties of the intracluster medium (ICM) out to the virial radius for a sample of 12 galaxy clusters selected from the Planck all-sky survey. We determine the universal profiles of gas density, temperature, pressure, and entropy over more than two decades in radius…
The ATHENA X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU)
2018
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2018, Austin, Texas, United States.