Twenty years of XMM-Newton
Abstract
XMM-Newton, a large X-ray observatory launched by the European Space Agency (ESA), will be 20 years old in 2019. This cornerstone mission from ESA's Horizon 2000 programme continues to make ground breaking discoveries twenty years after its launch. Thanks to its sensitivity and wide field of view, XMM-Newton has studied hundreds of thousands of stars and active galactic nuclei (AGN), as well as rarer objects such as galaxy clusters, supernova remnants, X-ray binaries, ultra luminous X-ray sources (ULXs), exoplanets and even the aurora on planets within our solar system. Since the conception of XMM-Newton, France has played an important role in this flagship mission, initially in developing the instruments carried on board and since 1996 in the ground segment activities (XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre). Here we will review some of the more notable results from this observatory and discuss the outlook for the future with XMM-Newton and the next ESA large X-ray observatory, Athena.
- Publication:
-
SF2A-2019: Proceedings of the Annual meeting of the French Society of Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019sf2a.conf...59W
- Keywords:
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- X-rays: general;
- Telescopes;
- Surveys;
- Catalogs