Photo of the day: space "bouquet" for the day of March 8

Today, March 8, in a number of countries around the world, including Russia, International Women's Day is celebrated. For this holiday, the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IKI RAS) timed the publication of a "bouquet" of photographs of beautiful X-ray objects.

The composite image shows supernova remnants, a radio pulsar, a cluster of young stars in a star-forming region in our galaxy, and supermassive black holes, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies outside the Milky Way.

The images were transmitted to Earth from the Spektr-RG orbital observatory, which was successfully launched last summer. This apparatus is equipped with two X-ray telescopes with oblique incidence optics: the ART-XC instrument (Russia) and the eRosita instrument (Germany).

The main goal of the project is to map the entire sky in the soft (0,3–8 keV) and hard (4–20 keV) ranges of the X-ray spectrum with unprecedented sensitivity.

Currently Spectrum-RG performs the first of eight planned sky surveys. The main scientific program of the observatory is designed for four years, and the total period of active existence of the device should be at least six and a half years. 

Source: 3dnews.ru