The Athena WFI Serendipitous Survey
Abstract
Athena's unprecedented collecting area and excellent angular resolution, coupled with the large field of view of the WFI camera, guarantees that Athena has a major potential for serendipitous science which will complement planned survey observations. With an anticipated mean exposure time of 50 ksec, each Athena WFI pointing (expected to be ∼40% of the total) will reach a flux limit close to 10-16 rg cm-2 s-1 in the soft band, yielding ∼3500 source detections. Over the course of the mission, each year of observing time will yield a harvest of >600,000 sources, more than 10 times larger than obtained with XMM-Newton. This paper will outline the prospects for the Athena serendipitous survey and the challenges posed by the identification and multi-wavelength follow-up.
- Publication:
-
Exploring the Hot and Energetic Universe: The first scientific conference dedicated to the Athena X-ray observatory
- Pub Date:
- September 2015
- Bibcode:
- 2015eheu.conf...25W