Title: The scientific goals of Spectrum-X/eRosita X-Ray observatory (Russia, Germany) - all sky survey, 100 000 clusters of galaxies and 3 Mln AGNs, cosmology and astrophysics

Lecturer: Prof. Rashid A. Sunyaev

Host: ZHANG Shuangnan

Time: 10:00 AM, May 12

Place: Room C305, IHEP Main Building

Abstract：

eROSITA will be the primary instrument on-board the Russian "Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma" (SRG) satellite which will be launched from Baikonur in 2015 and placed in an L2 orbit. It will perform the first imaging all-sky survey in the medium energy X-ray range up to 10 keV with an unprecedented spectral and angular resolution.

The main scientific goals are

？ ？to detect the hot intergalactic medium of 50-100 thousand galaxy clusters and groups and hot gas in filaments between clusters to map out the large scale structure in the Universe for the study of cosmic structure evolution,

？ ？to detect systematically all obscured accreting Black Holes in nearby galaxies and many (up to 3 Million) new, distant active galactic nuclei and

？ ？to study in detail the physics of galactic X-ray source populations, like pre-main sequence stars, supernova remnants and X-ray binaries.

About the lecturer:

Rashid Sunyaev was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and educated at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Moscow University. The head of the High Energy Astrophysics Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences from 1982 to 2002 and chief scientist of the Academy’s Space Research Institute since 1992, he holds several concurrent positions, including editor-in-chief of Astronomy Letters. He currently divides his time between Moscow and Garching, Germany, where he is managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. He worked for several years with his teacher, Yakov B. Zel’dovich, in the Moscow Institute of Applied Mathematics, where the two proposed what is known as the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect, an important method for determining absolute distances and hence the Hubble constant from the effect of gas in galaxy clusters on the cosmic microwave background radiation. Sunyaev and N. Shakura developed a model of disk accretion onto black holes, and he has proposed a signature for X-radiation from matter spiraling into a black hole. He has collaborated in important studies of the early universe, including the recombination of hydrogen and the formation of the cosmic microwave background radiation.