For a quarter of a year "eRosita" has been traveling through space, now the German X-ray telescope has delivered the first images. Among other things, they show our neighboring galaxy - the Large Magellanic Cloud - as well as two galaxy clusters at a distance of about 800 million light years.
"eRosita" is considered the most important German-Russian space project. It's about a scientific problem that could hardly be more fundamental: until now, humanity has no idea what the vast majority of the cosmos actually consists of. Researchers speak of dark matter and dark energy. Both should "eRosita" get on the track.
The special feature of the telescope: It makes structures of the universe visible via X-ray radiation. This does not show the dark energy directly, but its effect. The telescope scans the entire sky for so-called galaxy clusters. These are gigantic large collections of some thousands of individual galaxies, interconnected by the effect of gravity.
100 million degrees hot gases
In addition to the matter that is gathered in the galaxies, the heaps consist of large amounts of gas. This is up to 100 million degrees hot - and thereby emits X-rays. It is she who is looking for the telescope. (Read more about this here.)
The colorful clouds on the current images are gases and remnants of supernovas that arise when a star explodes. "The first pictures delivered by our telescope show the true beauty of the hidden universe," said project leader Peter Predehl of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, which published the pictures.
Depending on where the piles are in space, they allow a glimpse back into the history of the universe. That's because their radiation took several billion years to reach us. Those who watch them today, so to speak, look back in time. As a result, "eRosita" can look backwards for up to six billion years.
The Large Magellanic Cloud can be seen on the first "eRosita" pictures as a round reddish structure. In between are bright dots - stars or black holes in distant galaxies, which collect matter around and thereby radiate bright.
"You have not seen that yet"
According to the researchers, the recording of green shimmering clusters of galaxies, which are connected by blue streaks, is particularly spectacular. That's proof that the galaxy clusters - A3391 and A3395 - are interacting. "You have not seen this before, but you had the hope to show it with 'eRosita'," said Predehl.
Reiprich, Ramos-Ceja, Pacaud, Eckert, Sanders, Ota, Bulbul & Ghirardini / MPE / IKI
"eRosita" pictures: Interacting galaxy clusters A3391 (top) and A3395
"eRosita" launched into space on July 14 with a Russian launcher from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. On board was also a Russian telescope. Both have now reached their 1.5 million kilometers away destination.
The data is to be used to create a sky map depicting the universe and its evolution. Astronomers expect to find 100,000 galaxy clusters and millions of active black holes in the galactic centers.