The Athena X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU)
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2016, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Non-thermal pressure support in X-COP galaxy clusters
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…
Magnetic shielding of soft protons in future X-ray telescopes: the case of the ATHENA Wide Field Imager
Both the interplanetary space and the Earth magnetosphere are populated by low energy ($\leq300$ keV) protons that are potentially able to scatter on the reflecting surface of Wolter-I optics of X-ray focusing telescopes and reach the focal plane. This phenomenon, depending on the X-ray instrumentation, can dramatically increase the background level, reducing the sensitivity or, in the most extreme cases, compromising the observation itself. The use of a magnetic diverter, deflecting protons away from the field of view, requires a detailed characterization of their angular and energy distribution when exiting the mirror. We present the first end-to-end Geant4 simulation of proton scattering…
The Athena X-ray Integral Field Unit: a consolidated design for the system requirement review of the preliminary definition phase
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…
Universal thermodynamic properties of the intracluster medium over two decades in radius in the X-COP sample
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)
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2018, Austin, Texas, United States.