Russian-German observatory discovers over 23,000 galactic clusters

MOSCOW, December 19. /TASS/. The Spektr-RG, a Russian-German orbital observatory, has uncovered more than 23,000 galactic clusters among 1.5 mln X-ray sources discovered by the eROSITA telescope during four complete surveys of the sky and one incomplete one, Research Director of the Russian element of the Spektr-RG mission Academician Rashid Syunyaev said on Monday at the HEA-2022 conference. "As part of one incomplete and four complete surveys of the sky, we managed to detect more than 1.5 million X-ray sources, including 23,000 galaxy clusters, in that half of the night sky, which is the Russian part of the mission. This is a record to date," the academician said. Scientists have managed so far to determine distances of just 140,000 out of 1.5 mln sources discovered by the eROSITA telescope, the researcher noted. The SRG-z project was created to determine distances and study all properties of other targets, with the systemic examination of these X-ray wave sources by Russian and foreign astronomers using terrestrial telescopes. Seven dozen bursts of X-ray waves are of particular interest, the academic said. They were presumably registered by the Spektr-RG at the time of the destruction of stars by the gravity of superheavy black holes in distant galaxies. Identifying the position and researching these targets will reveal the history of the interaction of black holes and luminaries in the early and modern Universe. Photo by Yuri Smityuk/TASS Read more