Scientists have unveiled the largest ever X-ray map of the universe and found over 9,00,000 high-energy cosmic sources, including more than 7,00,000 supermassive black holes
The German "eROSITA" consortium on January 31 published the data collected by the eROSITA X-ray telescope on board the Russian-German satellite Spektrum-RG.
The first eROSITA All-Sky Survey Catalogue (eRASS1) is the largest collection of X-ray sources ever published, the Max Planck Society in Germany, which helped manage the mission, said in an official statement.
"In the first six months of observation, eROSITA has already discovered more X-ray sources than have been known in the 60-year history of X-ray astronomy," it said.
The eRASS1 observations with the eROSITA telescope were carried out between December 12, 2019, and June 11, 2020.
eROSITA was put in "Safe Mode" in February 2022 and has not restarted science operations since, the Max Planck Society said.
Besides around 7,10,000 supermassive black holes in distant galaxies, the 9,00,000 high-energy cosmic sources also included 1,80,000 X-ray emitting stars in the Milky Way, 12,000 clusters of galaxies and a small number of other exotic classes of sources like X-ray emitting binary stars, supernova remnants, pulsars, and other objects.
"These are mind-blowing numbers for X-ray astronomy," Andrea Merloni, eROSITA principal investigator, said.
"We've detected more sources in 6 months than the big flagship missions XMM-Newton and Chandra have done in nearly 25 years of operation," she added.
