The Voyage of Metals in the Universe from Cosmological to Planetary Scales: the need for a Very High-Resolution, High Throughput Soft X-ray Spectrometer

Abstract

Metals form an essential part of the Universe at all scales. Without metals we would not exist, and the Universe would look completely different. Metals are primarily produced via nuclear processes in stars, and spread out through winds or explosions, which pollute the surrounding space. The wanderings of metals in-and-out of astronomical objects are crucial in determining their own evolution and thus that of the Universe as a whole. Detecting metals and assessing their relative and absolute abundances and energetics can thus be used to trace the evolution of these cosmic components. The scope of this paper is to highlight the most important open astrophysical problems that will be central in the next decades and for which a deep understanding of the Universe’s wandering metals, their physical and kinematical states, and their chemical composition represents the only viable solution. The majority of these studies can only be efficiently performed through High Resolution Spectroscopy in the soft X-ray band.

High-precision Transition Energy Measurements of Neon-like Fe xvii Ions

“…Our improved transition-energy measurements for Fe XVII are sufficiently accurate that the uncertainties are no longer a significant part of the error budget for present or future planned astrophysical instruments, such as Chandra HETGS, XMM-Newton RGS, XRISM (Tashiro et al 2018) Arcus (Heilmann et al 2022), HiReX (Nicastro et al 2021), and Lynx (Schwartz et al 2019). Future campaigns of similar measurements of prominent transitions in key ions (especially Fe-L shell ions) would be of great utility and could easily be directly included in commonly used astrophysical plasma spectral databases.…”

Hubble Space Telescope Captures UGC 12591: Bulge/Disk Properties, Star Formation and `Missing Baryons' Census in a Very Massive and Fast Spinning Hybrid Galaxy

“…The X-ray corona of all the over massive spirals detected so far show a trend of declining temperature profile, and beyond virial radius most likely their gas temperature would be below < 10 6 K where EUV and FUV wavelengths provide the best diagnostics. These baryons may exist in a cold and low density phase which makes it very difficult to observe them with current X-ray telescopes, hence these are prime targets for future highly promising exploratory missions (Simionescu et al 2021;Bregman et al 2018;Nicastro et al 2021).…”

“…So, the small star formation rate indicates the presence of more abundance of metallic elements in its gaseous clouds which could have been thus enriched due to past supernova explosions in the disc which in turn may have blown out baryons in the halo of the galaxy. In future a sensitive spectroscopic measurement of metal abundance of the baryons in the circum galactic halos will be necessary to test this model (see Simionescu et al (2021); Nicastro et al (2021) and a review by Tumlinson et al (2017)).…”