Are there major initiatives for which the capabilities of @ChandraScience are absolutely required to address fundamental questions about our current understanding of the Universe that would represent a crucial missed opportunity if they are not completed during Chandra's lifetime?
The community responded, and we are pleased to announce two Chandra Legacy Programs https://cxc.harvard.edu/CLP/
What did we do & why is this interesting? Deep technical dive ahead!
We learn about accreting #BlackHoles studying their spectra & short-term (~millisecond) variability, called timing. However, individually, both approaches leave us with a lot of puzzles - so we try to combine them in spectral-timing.
Yes, parts V to VII of this series were my PhD thesis back in the days (and there are two more PhD thesis in the earlier papers of the series). Ole is proudly carrying on the work!
And it's also fun to see how we keep adding more pieces to the puzzle but also how much there is that we still don't know when it comes to variability.
There is far more than one PhD thesis in this source still :D
We recently released version 2.1 of the #ChandraXRay Source Catalog!
In short, everything we observed that was released publicly prior to the end of 2021 has been reduced, processed, and made available for easy consumption. With over 400,000 individual sources and covering 730 square degrees, the CSC opens the X-ray sky to all astronomers -- even if you've never looked at an X-ray photon before.
Are you at #HEAD21? Come swing by our booth! Get a brand-new #Chandra25 sticker, find out about the upcoming symposium (https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/cdo/symposium_2024/), ask your questions about the observatory, and find out about the great new work being done by our archives and source catalog teams!
Wheeee! One of my PhD siblings and one of my favorite collaborators were awarded the 2024 HEAD (high energy astrophysics division) innovation prize for the "development of novel models to describe emission in the strong gravity regime from accreting compact objects" or in simpler words: developing methods to learn from the shape of X-ray emission from the vicinity of black holes how #BlackHoles spin & what else happens there 😊
Oh, lovely! There will be a "#XRISM Science performance & data analysis workshop" at the university of Geneva this February. And it will indeed be a workshop with extensive hands on sessions:
If you prefer to read things instead of listening (as do I myself; not an audio person ... 😅 ), Physics World has now turned the podcast with me into a written interview:
It's about my science, but also about all the things I do as a scientist that are not my science - climate crisis outreach and Astronomers for Planet Earth, my art and outreach in general.
Physics World has talked to me about my science and about all the things I do as a scientist that are not my science - climate activism and Astronomers for Planet Earth (@a4e), my art and outreach in general :)
If podcasts are your thing, you may like this one (also download able on all usual #podcast sources):
#Papertime! 🌌 💫 📡 (From Monday, but I totally did not have the time to post this before ...)
"The first mm detection of a neutron star high-mass X-ray binary" led by the amazing J. van den Eijnden, including @fuerst, @pkretsch, yours truly et al.
MNRAS submitted (not yet refereed).