Description
NewAthena will be the European Space Agency’s next large X-ray observatory, planned for launch in 2037. It will have revolutionary capabilities enabled by the combination of a lightweight large collecting-area mirror, a high-resolution spatially resolved X-ray integral-field spectrometer, and a wide-field X-ray imager. This next-generation observatory will thus enable transformational progress across all areas of astrophysics in the next decade, building on the legacy of the last 25 years of X-ray observation with Chandra and XMM-Newton.
In this talk, I will provide an update on the status of the NewAthena study phase for the community. I will also discuss the broad range of science that NewAthena will enable – including the growth of supermassive black holes across cosmic time and their impact on galaxy evolution, the assembly of the large-scale structure of the Universe, the stellar lifecycle (and its endpoints), the equation of dense matter in neutron stars, and the astrophysical nature of neutrino and gravitational wave sources – with a particular focus on what we can learn from the last several decades of X-ray observation as we develop our plans for NewAthena (and how the community can get involved now!).
