Related papers: The Need for Ultra High Resolution X-ray Imaging
Imaging at hard X-ray energies (~10-600 keV) over very large fields of view (~60 deg per telescope) is required to conduct a high sensitivity all-sky and all-time survey for black holes. The proposed Energetic X-ray Imaging Survey Telescope…
Some tests of fundamental physics - the equation of state at supra-nuclear densities, the metric in strong gravity, the effect of magnetic fields above the quantum critical value - can only be measured using compact astrophysical objects:…
It is anticipated that mass accretion rates exceeding approximately $10^{19}\,{\rm g\,s^{-1}}$ in X-ray pulsars lead to radiation-driven outflows from super-critical accretion discs. The outflows launched from the disc influence the angular…
Upcoming astronomical surveys produce imagery that spans many orders of magnitude in spatial scale, requiring scientists to reason fluidly between global structure and local detail. Data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory exemplifies this…
Future X-ray telescopes like SIMBOL-X will operate in a wide band of the X-ray spectrum (from 0.1 to 80 keV); these telescopes will extend the optical performances of the existing soft X-ray telescopes to the hard X-ray band, and in…
Optical interferometry has been successful at achieving milliarcsecond resolution on bright stars. Imaging performance can improve greatly by increasing the number of baselines, which has motivated proposals to build large (~ 100 m) optical…
SIMBOL-X is a hard X-ray mission, operating in the 0.5-70 keV range, which is proposed by a consortium of European laboratories for a launch around 2010. Relying on two spacecraft in a formation flying configuration, SIMBOL-X uses a 30 m…
Accretion is a universal astrophysical process that plays a key role in cosmic history, from the epoch of reionization to galaxy and stellar formation and evolution. Accreting stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries are one of the best…
By means of numerical simulations, we demonstrate the innovative use of computational ghost imaging in transmission electron microscopy to retrieve images with a resolution that overcomes the limitations imposed by coherent aberrations. The…
Gamma-ray Astronomy studies cosmic accelerators through their electromagnetic radiation in the energy range between ~100 MeV and ~100 TeV. The present most sensitive observations in this energy band are performed, from space, by the Large…
The X-ray observatories XMM-Newton and Chandra provided a wealth of exciting new results. Chandra delivered X-ray images of outstanding detail, reaching subarcsecond spatial resolution for the first time in X-ray astronomy. XMM-Newton…
This chapter discusses the use and possibilities of optical and infrared interferometry to study star formation. The chapter starts with a brief overview of the star formation process and highlights the open questions from an observational…
The majority of the ordinary matter in the local Universe has been heated by strong structure formation shocks and resides in a largely unexplored hot, diffuse, X-ray emitting plasma that permeates the halos of galaxies, galaxy groups and…
X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFEL) are revolutionary photons sources, whose ultrashort, brilliant pulses are expected to allow single molecule diffraction experiments providing structural information on the atomic length scale. This ultimate…
The resolution limits of classical spectroscopy can be surpassed by quantum-inspired methods leveraging the information contained in the phase of the complex electromagnetic field. Their counterpart in spatial imaging has been widely…
Hard X-ray and low-energy gamma-ray coded-aperture imaging instruments have been highly successful as high-energy surveyors and transient-source discoverers and trackers over the past decades. Albeit having relatively low sensitivity as…
Spectral imaging is a fundamental diagnostic technique with widespread application. Conventional spectral imaging approaches have intrinsic limitations on spatial and spectral resolutions due to the physical components they rely on. To…
Some 400 years after Galileo, modern telescopes have enabled humanity to "see" what the natural eye cannot. Astronomical images today contain information about incredibly large objects located across vast distances and reveal information…
Exoplanets mass measurements will be a critical next step to assess the habitability of Earth-like planets: a key aspect of the 2020 vision in the previous decadal survey and also central to NASA's strategic priorities. Precision astrometry…
The great success of the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) has shown that X-ray timing is an excellent tool for the study of strong gravitational fields and the measurement of fundamental physical properties of black holes and neutron…