This week saw the launch of a spacecraft intended to search the sky for X-ray bursts that may shed light on enigmatic events connected to black holes and merging stars. According to a press release from the European Space Agency, China’s Long March 2C rocket carried the Einstein probe, named for the renowned theoretical physicist of German descent. The spacecraft was launched on Tuesday. The Long March rockets of China are operated by the Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, which verified the successful launch on social media. The European Space Agency, the German Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences worked together to build the spacecraft. Finding evidence of X-ray bursts could aid researchers in gaining a deeper comprehension of the high-energy processes.
Hunting for X-ray blasts
The Einstein probe uses two instruments to detect blasts of X-ray light that these phenomena emit: a Wide-field X-ray Telescope (WXT) and the Follow-up X-ray Telescope (FXT).
The WXT is designed to make broad scans of the sky, hunting for X-ray beams. The instrument is modeled after the eyes of lobsters, which have thousands of square pores that funnel light into a circular center. Using a similar design on the telescope allows the WXT to capture one-tenth of the entire sky in a single snapshot, according to the ESA.
After the WXT instrument detects an X-ray, the more sensitive FXT instrument is designed to quickly gather more in-depth information.
