MOSCOW. Dec 18 (Interfax) - Russia's Spektr-RG orbital observatory has detected dozens of super-massive X-ray sources in the course of the second sweeping sky scan, Roscosmos said in a statement.
"On Tuesday, December 15, 2020, a year after the sky scan began, Russia's ART-XC telescope named after M.N. Pavlinsky of the Spektr-RG observatory completed the second sky scan," the corporation said.
"The total number of X-ray sources has practically doubled on the complete map, to around 1,000," it said.
"It took decades to prepare hard X-ray catalogues, similar to the ones delivered by the ART-XC telescope over one year of its operation, by means of earlier instruments. The sources detected by the Russian ART-XC telescope include dozens of hitherto unknown objects inside and outside the galaxy, among them super-massive black holes wrapped up in cold gas envelopes and unseen in soft X-ray bands. Some of the registered sources are extremely fluid, judging from the comparison of the first and second scan maps," Roscosmos said.
Project supervisor and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Rashid Syunyayev said earlier that astrophysicists and cosmologists from all over the world would be using the images "for at least 20 to 30 years."
The press service of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Space Research Institute said on June 10 that Spektr-RG had finalized the first spy scan, which started on December 8, 2019, and took six months to complete.
The institute published a map of the entire sky in galactic coordinates, which was drawn on the basis of information from the ART-XC telescope, and indicated every registered event. It noted that the map had an angular resolution of less than 1 arc-minute, which makes the map unique. Previously, a map of the whole sky of a comparable resolution was available only in the soft X-ray band. Hard X-ray maps had a much worse angular resolution of about one arc degree.
The Spektr-RG was launched from Baikonur on July 13, 2019. It was built in cooperation with Germany under the Russian federal space program for the Russian Academy of Sciences. The observatory has two X-ray telescopes: one Russian, the Astronomical Roentgen Telescope X-ray Concentrator (ART-XC) and one German, eROSITA. Both operate utilizing the principle of the oblique-incidence X-ray optics. The telescopes are installed on the Navigator platform (made by Russia's NPO Lavochkin), which was adapted for the project.
The mission's primary objective is to map the whole sky in soft and hard X-ray bands with unprecedented sensitivity.