The origin of the unfocused XMM-Newton background, its variability and lessons learned for ATHENA

Fabio Gastaldello, Martino Marelli, Silvano Molendi +7

We analyzed the unexposed to the sky outFOV region of the MOS2 detector on board XMM-Newton covering 15 years of data amounting to 255 Ms. We show convincing evidence that the orig…