The Next Generation X-ray Galaxy Survey with eROSITA

Abstract

eROSITA, launched on 13 July 2019, will be completing the first all-sky survey in the soft and medium X-ray band in nearly three decades. This 4-year survey, finishing in late 2023, will present a rich legacy for the entire astrophysics community and complement upcoming multi-wavelength surveys (with, e.g. the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and the Dark Energy Survey). Besides the major scientific aim to study active galactic nuclei (AGN) and galaxy clusters, eROSITA will contribute significantly to X-ray studies of normal (i.e., not AGN) galaxies. Starting from multi-wavelength catalogues, we measure star formation rates and stellar masses for 60 212 galaxies constrained to distances of 50-200 Mpc. We chose this distance range to focus on the relatively unexplored volume outside the local Universe, where galaxies will be largely spatially unresolved and probe a range of X-ray luminosities that overlap with the low luminosity and/or highly obscured AGN population. We use the most recent X-ray scaling relations as well as the on-orbit eROSITA instrument performance to predict the X-ray emission from XRBs and diffuse hot gas and to perform both an analytic prediction and an end-to-end simulation using the mission simulation software, SIXTE. We consider potential contributions from hidden AGN and comment on the impact of normal galaxies on the measurement of the faint end of the AGN luminosity function. We predict that the eROSITA 4-year survey, will detect $\gtrsim$ 15 000 galaxies (3 $\sigma$ significance) at 50-200 Mpc, which is ~100X more normal galaxies than detected in any X-ray survey to date.

18 pages, 15 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

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• A census of ultraluminous X-ray sources in the local Universe
• The eROSITA Final Equatorial Depth Survey (eFEDS): X-ray emission around star-forming and quiescent galaxies at $0.05<z<0.3$
• The Heraklion Extragalactic Catalogue (HECATE): a value-added galaxy catalogue for multi-messenger astrophysics
• Swift-XRT follow-up of gravitational wave triggers during the third aLIGO/Virgo observing run
• The Missing Link Between Black Holes in High-Mass X-ray Binaries and Gravitational-Wave Sources: Observational Selection Effects
• The eROSITA Final Equatorial-Depth Survey (eFEDS): Presenting The Demographics of X-ray Emission From Normal Galaxies
• Identification and Characterization of a Large Sample of Distant Active Dwarf Galaxies in XMM-SERVS
• The first all-sky survey of star-forming galaxies with eROSITA: Scaling relations and a population of X-ray luminous starbursts
• X-ray Binaries in External Galaxies