e-ROSITA X-ray telescope has revealed a new map of the entire sky. The map which was released on June 19, is based on data from the first full scan of the sky made by the telescope which was launched in July 2019.
The six-month, all-sky survey, which began in December and wrapped up in June, is only the first of eight total sky surveys that e-ROSITA will perform over the next few years.
e-ROSITA’s new map reveals objects about four times as faint as could be seen in the last survey of the whole X-ray sky, conducted by the ROSAT space telescope, as reported by sciencenews.org.
According to the report, about 20 percent of the marks on eROSITA’s map stars in the Milky Way with intense magnetic fields and hot coronae. Scattered among these are star systems containing neutron stars, black holes and white dwarfs, and remnants of supernova explosions. eROSITA also caught several fleeting bursts from events like stellar collisions.
ROSITA team member Andrea Merloni, an astronomer also at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics said: "Closer to home, observations of supernova remnants could help clear up some confusion about the life cycles of big stars."
“Maybe we’ll start balancing this budget between the expected number of supernovae and the ones that we are detecting,” Merloni said.
