High-resolution X-ray spectroscopy: the coming-of-age

Abstract

Since the launch of Chandra and XMM-Newton, high-resolution X-ray spectra of cosmic sources of all kinds have become available. These spectra have resulted in major scientific breakthroughs. However, due to the techniques used, in general high-quality spectra can only be obtained for the brightest few sources of each class. Moreover, except for the most compact extended sources, like cool core clusters, grating spectra are limited to point sources. Hitomi made another major step forward, in yielding for the first time a high-quality spectrum of an extended source, and improved spectral sensitivity in the Fe-K band. For point sources with the proposed Arcus mission, and for all sources with the launch of Athena, X-ray spectroscopy will become mature. It allows us to extend the investigations from the few handful of brightest sources of each category to a large number of sources far away in space and time, or to get high time-resolution, high-spectral resolution spectra of bright time variable sources.

7 pages, 9 figures, to appear in Astronomische Nachrichten, presented at the XMM-Newton: The Next Decade conference, ESAC, Madrid, Spain, 9 - 11 May 2016

References in corpus (10)

• The Quiescent Intracluster Medium in the Core of the Perseus Cluster
• Resolved atomic lines reveal outflows in two ultraluminous X-ray sources
• A fast and long-lived outflow from the supermassive black hole in NGC 5548
• The Accretion Disk Wind in the Black Hole GRO J1655-40
• Chemical Enrichment RGS cluster sample (CHEERS): Constraints on turbulence
• Anatomy of the AGN in NGC 5548: II. The Spatial, Temporal and Physical Nature of the Outflow from HST/COS Observations
• Origin of central abundances in the hot intra-cluster medium - II. Chemical enrichment and supernova yield models
• Origin of central abundances in the hot intra-cluster medium - I. Individual and average abundance ratios from XMM-Newton EPIC
• Anatomy of the AGN in NGC 5548. VI. Long-term variability of the warm absorber
• Calibration and in orbit performance of the reflection grating spectrometer onboard XMM-Newton

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Density diagnostics of ionized outflows in active galactic nuclei: X-ray and UV absorption lines from metastable levels in Be-like to C-like ions
• Evidence for Radiation Pressure Compression in the X-ray Narrow Line Region of Seyfert galaxies
• Inferring black hole spins and probing accretion/ejection flows in AGNs with the Athena X-ray Integral Field Unit
• TPHO: a time-dependent photoionisation model for AGN outflows
• Discovery of Galactic OIV and OV X-ray absorption due to transition temperature gas in the PKS 2155-304 spectrum
• Measuring masses in low mass X-ray binaries via X-ray spectroscopy: the case of MXB 1659-298
• The multi-epoch X-ray tale of I Zwicky 1 outflows
• Cosmic metal invaders: Intergalactic OVII as a tracer of the warm-hot intergalactic medium within cosmic filaments in the EAGLE simulation