Related papers: In-orbit background for X-ray detectors
The nature of the ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULX) is still to be understood. Several hypotheses have been suggested to explain the high X-ray luminosity: stellar mass black holes with emission collimated by relativistic effects or…
We summarize the relationship between the free-free emission foreground and Galactic H-alpha emission. H-alpha observations covering nearly the entire celestial sphere are described. These data provide a template to isolate and/or remove…
We present a synthesis model of the X-ray background based on the cross-correlation between mid-infrared and X-ray surveys, where the distribution of type 2 sources is assumed to follow that of luminous infrared galaxies while type 1…
Intrinsic absorbers are significant components of AGN environments that provide valuable information and interesting challenges. We present a very brief (and biased, and sometimes speculative) overview of intrinsic absorbers from the…
X-ray appearance of normal galaxies is mainly determined by X-ray binaries powered by accretion onto a neutron star or a stellar mass black hole. Their populations scale with the star-formation rate and stellar mass of the host galaxy and…
The next generation of ground-based gravitational-wave detectors will look much deeper into the Universe and have unprecedented sensitivities and low-frequency capabilities. Especially alluring is the possibility of detecting an…
Space-based astronomy of hard X-rays and gamma rays covers more than seven orders of magnitude in photon energy, from 10 keV to several hundred GeV. Detecting cosmic photons in this energy range is a challenge, due to the relatively low…
The Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER) is a suite of four instruments designed to study the near infrared (IR) background light from above the Earth's atmosphere. The instrument package comprises two imaging telescopes designed…
With the growing number of gravitational-wave detections, particularly from binary black hole mergers, there is increasing anticipation that an astrophysical background, formed by an ensemble of faint, high-redshift events, will be observed…
Naturally occurring radiation backgrounds cause correlated decoherence events in superconducting qubits. These backgrounds include both gamma rays produced by terrestrial radioisotopes and cosmic rays. We use the particle-transport code…
Indirect searches for dark matter are based on detecting an anomalous flux of photons, neutrinos or cosmic-rays produced in annihilations or decays of dark matter candidates gravitationally accumulated in heavy cosmological objects, like…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation provides a remarkable window onto the early universe, revealing its composition and structure. In these lectures we review and discuss the physics underlying the main features of the CMB.
We briefly review sources of cosmic rays, their composition and spectra as well as their propagation in the galactic and extragalactic magnetic fields, both regular and fluctuating. A special attention is paid to the recent results of the…
Light bending due to strong gravity has recently been invoked to explain variability and flux correlations between different bands in some accreting black holes. A characteristic feature of light bending is reflection-dominated spectra,…
Multi-messenger astronomy provides for the observation of the same astronomical event with different kind of telescopes at the same time: optical observations, X-rays, gamma-ray bursts, neutrinos and, most recently, gravitational waves are…
As a space X-ray imaging mission dedicated to time-domain astrophysics, the Einstein Probe (EP) carries two kinds of scientific payloads, the wide-field X-ray telescope (WXT) and the follow-up X-ray telescope (FXT). FXT utilizes Wolter-I…
PolarLight is a space-borne X-ray polarimeter that measures the X-ray polarization via electron tracking in an ionization chamber. It is a collimated instrument and thus suffers from the background on the whole detector plane. The majority…
A careful analysis of the HEAO1 A2 2-10 keV full-sky map of the X-ray background (XRB) reveals clustering on the scale of several degrees. After removing the contribution due to beam smearing, the intrinsic clustering of the background is…
One of the key aspects of a detector material for space-borne hard X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes is the rate of prompt and delayed background events generated inside the material by charged and neutral particles striking the detector.…
Cosmic rays at the Earth include a secondary component originating in collisions of primary particles with the diffuse interstellar gas. The secondary cosmic rays are relatively rare but carry important information on the Galactic…