Athena Wide Field Imager Key Science Drivers

Abstract

The Wide Field Imager (WFI) is one of two instruments for the Advanced Telescope for High-ENergy Astrophysics (Athena). In this paper we summarise three of the many key science objectives for the WFI - the formation and growth of supermassive black holes, non-gravitational heating in clusters of galaxies, and spin measurements of stellar mass black holes - and describe their translation into the science requirements and ultimately instrument requirements. The WFI will be designed to provide excellent point source sensitivity and grasp for performing wide area surveys, surface brightness sensitivity, survey power, and absolute temperature and density calibration for in-depth studies of the outskirts of nearby clusters of galaxies and very good high-count rate capability, throughput, and low pile-up, paired with very good spectral resolution, for detailed explorations of bright Galactic compact objects.

arXiv comment11 pages, 10 figures, 1 table, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, Edinburgh (26 June - 1 July, 2016)

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• The metal content of the hot atmospheres of galaxy groups
• Bound on the graviton mass from Chandra X-ray cluster sample
• Chemical enrichment in groups and clusters
• Spectroscopic performance of flight-like DEPFET sensors for Athena's WFI
• Total ionizing dose test with DEPFET sensors for Athena's WFI
• Identifying charged particle background events in X-ray imaging detectors with novel machine learning algorithms