A serious X-ray observing mission is ready to launch on Saturday (Aug. 26), aiming to offer astronomers with views of among the universe’s most extreme, explosive and hot objects and events.
The X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), a collaboration between NASA and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) with assistance from the European Space Agency (ESA), will study things like hot gas envelopes surrounding galaxy clusters and violent outbursts from monster black holes. Its results should help scientists higher understand the evolution of the universe.
“X-ray astronomy enables us to check essentially the most energetic phenomena within the universe,” Matteo Guainazzi, ESA project scientist for XRISM, said in a statement. “It holds the important thing to answering vital questions in modern astrophysics: How the biggest structures within the universe evolve, how the matter we’re ultimately composed of was distributed through the cosmos, and the way galaxies are shaped by massive black holes at their centers.”
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XRISM will launch atop an H-IIA (H-2A) expendable launch system operated by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) from Tanegashima Space Center, Japan. It is predicted to operate for not less than three years.
Guainazzi explained that the 8% observing time ESA is allocated from XRISM’s available operating time will help form a bridge between the space agency’s currently operating XMM-Newton mission, which has spent 24 years in space collecting X-ray data, and Athena, set to launch within the late 2030s.
Seeing the the intense universe in X-rays
While astronomers have grow to be adept at seeing cosmic objects like stars and galaxies that emit light related to the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is the section our eyes have evolved to see, these observations only paint a part of the broader cosmic picture.
The cosmos can be permeated by electromagnetic radiation related to low-energy infrared wavelengths, which the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captures to great effect, in addition to high-energy X-rays and gamma-rays.
Though invisible to our eyes, those X-rays are emitted by things like gas lurking between stars and galaxies and from extreme and violent environments. Studying them can subsequently add vital details to our cosmic tapestry of the universe.
For instance, one key function of XRISM might be to check X-rays coming from super-hot massive envelopes of gas that surround galaxy clusters — among the largest structures within the known universe. This could help with measuring the masses of those clusters in addition to their gas envelopes, thus allowing astronomers to raised understand how these systems might’ve evolved.
As well as, X-rays from the gas envelopes could help astronomers determine how enriched the shells are with elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Those heavier elements are called “metals.”
Metal composition is essential to know because when the universe first began to be populated with stars and galaxies, the one elements that existed in considerable amounts were hydrogen and helium plus a tiny smattering of metals like nitrogen. It was the primary generation of stars that synthesized heavier elements through nuclear fusion of hydrogen and helium at their cores.
These heavy elements were then dispersed into the cosmos when the primary stars exploded as supernovas at the top of their lives. This enriched gas clouds surrounding galaxies with metals. Then, when overly dense patches of those clouds collapsed, to birth the second generation of stars, they produced much more metal-rich stars.
XRISM might be able to measuring the energy of high-energy X-ray photons, or light particles, through the use of its Resolve instrument. ESA’s forthcoming Athena mission will include an analogous device that might be informed by how Resolve performs with XRISM.
Resolve will allow astronomers to measure the temperatures and velocities of hot gases the mission observes with a high degree of accuracy. Plus, by mapping the metals in these clouds via emitted X-rays, XRISM could help scientists higher determine how the stellar-metal-enrichment process has proceeded throughout the last 13.8 billion years of cosmic history.
XRISM’s revolutionary X-ray investigation may even help physicists learn more about some fundamental cosmic phenomena, too.
How XRISM will put Einstein to the test
Albert Einstein’s 1915 theory of general relativity is currently often called the perfect explanation of gravity on cosmic scales we now have, but there are still facets of the universe that it struggles to account for. As an example, it doesn’t quite explain the way in which the universe’s expansion is accelerating.
That is why scientists still proceed to check the boundaries of general relativity, which can be often called Einstein’s geometric theory of gravity because it suggests objects with masses “warp” the material of space and time. Based on general relativity, it’s from this distortion that “gravity” arises. The more massive and dense an object is, the greater the distortion it causes.
The results of such warping, interestingly, can be seen when electromagnetic radiation or light passes by a distortion.
XRISM will make use of this effect when it looks at X-ray emissions from materials that surround essentially the most massive and dense objects within the universe, namely supermassive black holes that lie at the middle of most, if not all, large galaxies.
As these supermassive black holes feed on matter around them, an act that forms a flattened disk called an accretion disk, that material gets heated to tremendous temperatures. Moreover, powerful magnetic fields of the supermassive black holes channel charged matter in these disks that does not actually fall “into” the black hole to the void’s poles, from where it gets blasted out within the types of jets and winds moving at near the speed of sunshine.
Each of those processes, including the heating of fabric in accretion disks and the blasting of powerful winds and jets, cause that matter to emit X-rays.
So, by these X-rays with XRISM, scientists can determine how warped spacetime is around supermassive black holes, thus testing general relativity under perhaps essentially the most extreme circumstances possible.
Performing such fundamental physics investigations with X-rays and any high-energy astronomy requires sophisticated technology, and XRISM actually matches the bill.
The blast-off of XRISM is ready for 8:34 pm ET (0034 GMT) on Saturday and could be watched live in Japanese and English on JAXA’s YouTube channel. Live mission updates can be found on JAXA’s Twitter feed.