The scientific article published by Nature Astronomy concisely outlines the principal domains where X-ray astronomy is anticipated to advance our comprehension of the Universe in the forthcoming decade. It further delineates a novel mission concept currently under study at the European Space Agency (ESA), at the partner agencies (NASA and JAXA) and in the scientific community worldwide aimed at groundbreaking discoveries: NewAthena.
NewAthena constitutes an ESA flagship X-ray observatory mission, providing an order-of-magnitude improvement in sensitivity, spectroscopy and survey capabilities with respect to existing observatories. It will address many open questions in modern astrophysics, such as: the effect of stars on the habitability of their planets, the equation of state governing matter in neutron stars, the production and distribution of metals throughout the Universe, the mechanisms behind the cosmological evolution of baryons trapped by Dark Matter potential wells including groups and clusters of galaxies, and the effects of supermassive black holes on their host galaxy evolution, to name but a few. It will also contribute a key element to the field of multi-messenger astrophysics.
This study builds on the legacy of many years of scientific and technical work at ESA, in the Instrument Consortia (Wide Field Imager and X-ray Integral Field Unit), the international partners (NASA and JAXA), and by the broad Athena community. A fundamental part of NewAthena studies has been a large extragalactic survey to characterize growing supermassive black holes, and constrain their effect on groups and clusters of galaxies at the heyday of star formation and galaxy growth in the Universe. “With such a survey we will catch early groups of galaxies in a phase when their evolution is expected to be strongly disturbed by the activity of supermassive black holes” explains co-author Prof. Thomas Reiprich, Professor for Astrophysics at the Argelander Institute for Astronomy and member of the Transdisciplinary Research Area (TRA) "Building blocks of matter and fundamental interactions" both at the University of Bonn.
Another science case was developed that emerged from recent discoveries of the X-ray space telescope eROSITA: large-scale filaments of hot gas that permeate space and connect groups and clusters of galaxies. A few of these have now been detected around nearby massive clusters of galaxies.[1] “The study shows that NewAthena will not only be able to discover many more of these but also to characterize their density and temperature distribution as well as their enrichment by heavy elements,” says Prof. Reiprich.
According to Prof. Mike Cruise, Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics and Space research at the University of Birmingham (UK): " Following a period of technical revision and scientific review the NewAthena mission now stands as the foremost X-Ray mission of the next two decades. The combination of exceptional sensitivity and spectral resolution will significantly advance our ability to understand, among other mysteries, the detailed physics driving emission from clusters of galaxies, the energetics and population statistics of supermassive black holes, and the fundamental physics underlying many objects in the Hot Universe.”
[1] See https://astro.uni-bonn.de/en/news/2024/01/31/erosita-dr1-en and https://astro.uni-bonn.de/en/news/2020/12/17/IG-filament