Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Sep 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011head...12.3608l&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, HEAD meeting #12, #36.08
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
WHIMex is a low-cost, highly capable, single instrument X-ray observatory proposed as a NASA Explorer 2011 mission. WHIMex will use high resolution X-ray spectroscopy (R ≥ 4000) to probe the hot, tenuous gas that populates the great stretches between the galaxies - the place where most of the baryons in the Universe reside. The bulk of this gas is so hot that it can only be studied in the soft X-ray region where the atomic diagnostics for highly ionized species reside. And this gas is so tenuous that it can only be observed in absorption.
To detect the absorption lines of O VII and O VIII along the line of sight to distant AGN requires an order of magnitude improvement in both spectral resolution and collecting area over the current best X-ray spectrographs on Chandra and XMM-Newton. WHIMex achieves this goal in a compact and affordable package through the application of technologies that were developed over the last decade for the International X-ray Observatory. WHIMex uses ultra-thin, light, densely nested parabolic-hyperbolic mirror pairs to create a telescope with a high collecting area and <15 arcsecond resolution. The X-ray s are dispersed in wavelength by an array of radial gratings in the extreme off-plane mount. Spectral resolving power of 4000 (λ/δλ) is expected in the 0.3 to 0.8 keV band to bring weak absorption lines out of the noise. A collecting area up to 360 cm2 will enable spectral observations of high red shift AGNs.
If selected WHIMex could be launched in mid- 2017 on a Taurus or Athena II from Vandenberg AFB into a 540 km, 70° inclination low earth orbit. In flight, it would open a new field of exploration with high resolution observations of AGN outflows, the IGM, Interstellar Medium, mass transfer binaries, stellar coronae and much more.
Cash Webster C.
Instrument Teams
Lillie Charles F.
Science Whimex
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