Related papers: Discrimination of background events in the PolarLi…
PolarLight is a gas pixel X-ray polarimeter mounted on a CubeSat, which was launched into a Sun-synchronous orbit in October 2018. We build a mass model of the whole CubeSat with the Geant4 toolkit to simulate the background induced by the…
Polarimetry is widely considered a powerful observational technique in X-ray astronomy, useful to enhance our understanding of the emission mechanisms, geometry and magnetic field arrangement of many compact objects. However, the lack of…
We have measured the linear polarisation of hard X-ray emission from the Crab in a previously unexplored energy interval, 20-120 keV. The introduction of two new observational parameters, the polarisation fraction and angle stands to…
Strong magnetic fields, synchrotron emission, and Compton scattering are omnipresent in compact celestial X-ray sources. Emissions in the X-ray energy band are consequently expected to be linearly polarized. X-ray polarimetry provides a…
X-ray astronomy allows study of objects which may be associated with compact objects, i.e. neutron stars or black holes, and also may contain strong magnetic fields. Such objects are categorically non-spherical, and likely non-circular when…
The gas pixel detector (GPD) is designed and developed for high-sensitivity astronomical X-ray polarimetry, which is a new window about to open in a few years. Due to the small mass, low power, and compact geometry of the GPD, we propose a…
Polarimetric studies of astrophysical sources can make important contributions to resolve the geometry of the emitting region and determine the photon emission mechanism. PoGOLite is a balloon-borne polarimeter operating in the hard X-ray…
X-ray polarimetry promises to give qualitatively new information about high-energy astrophysical sources, such as binary black hole systems, micro-quasars, active galactic nuclei, neutron stars, and gamma-ray bursts. We designed, built and…
Soon after the discovery of the first extrasolar X-Ray sources it was suggested that polarimetry could play a major role as a diagnostic tool. Attempts to measure polarization of X-Ray sources was performed by the team of Columbia…
The prospects for accomplishing x-ray polarization measurements of astronomical sources have grown in recent years, after a hiatus of more than 37 years. Unfortunately, accompanying this long hiatus has been some confusion over the…
Polarization is one of the fundamental natures of electromagnetic radiation. The detection of polarization or polarized photons from distant X-ray radiating systems (such as X-ray binaries (XBs), active galactic nuclei (AGN), pulsars, and…
An event-based maximum likelihood method for handling X-ray polarimetry data is extended to include the effects of background and nonuniform sampling of the possible position angle space. While nonuniform sampling in position angle space…
X-ray polarization from the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) provides an important new probe of the geometry of the pulsar emission zone and of particle acceleration in the surrounding pulsar wind nebula (PWN). However, with IXPE's…
Well over 700 exoplanets have been detected to date. Only a handful of these have been observed directly. Direct observation is extremely challenging due to the small separation and very large contrast involved. Imaging polarimetry offers a…
XL-Calibur is a balloon-borne Compton polarimeter for X-rays in the $\sim$15-80 keV range. Using an X-ray mirror with a 12 m focal length for collecting photons onto a beryllium scattering rod surrounded by CZT detectors, a…
Polarization is a basic property of light and is fundamentally linked to the internal geometry of a source of radiation. Polarimetry complements photometric, spectroscopic, and imaging analyses of sources of radiation and has made possible…
Polarimetry remains a largely unexploited technique in observational X-ray astronomy which could provide insight in the study of the strong gravity and magnetic fields at the core of the Constellation-X observational program. Adding a…
In astronomy there are basically four kinds of observations to extract the information carried by electromagnetic radiation: photometry, imaging, spectroscopy and polarimetry. By optimal exploitation of the first three techniques, X-ray…
We report follow-up observations of the Crab nebula with the PolarLight X-ray polarimeter, which revealed a possible variation in polarization associated with a pulsar glitch in 2019. The new observations confirm that the polarization has…
PoGOLite is a hard X-ray polarimeter operating in the 25-100 keV energy band. The instrument design is optimised for the observation of compact astrophysical sources. Observations are conducted from a stabilised stratospheric balloon…