• DOI:10.22323/1.306.0046
• Corpus ID: 125099507

Highlights from the X-ray Astronomy Satellite Hitomi (ASTRO-H)

@inproceedings{Ishida2018HighlightsFT,
  title={Highlights from the X-ray Astronomy Satellite Hitomi (ASTRO-H)},
  author={M. Ishida},
  year={2018}
}

• M. Ishida
• Published 11 April 2018
• Physics

The 6th Japanese X-ray astronomy satellite Hitomi was successfully launched on 2016 February 17th. The main mission instrument SXS (the X-ray micro calorimeter) has achieved spectral resolution of 4.97 eV at 5.9 keV in orbit, which is much better than any CCD camera in orbit so far by more than 30 times. Although Hitomi's life in orbit is unfortunately only $\sim$1 month, the SXS has high resolution spectroscopy for several targets. In the Perseus cluster observation, the SXS detected the turbulent motion of the ICM plasma for the first time, and found that the jet from the central AGN (NGC 1275) is not dynamically powerful enough to sustain the central part of the ICM as hot as it is; there must be some other heat sources. In the observation of N132D, the SXS discovered that the optically thin thermal plasma, traced with an iron He$\alpha$ emission line, is receding from us with a velocity of 1200 km s$^{-1}$ in the rest frame of the host galaxy LMC. This result suggests that the progenitor explosion was highly anisotropic. In this way the SXS has demonstrated the power of non-dispersive high resolution spectroscopy. Accordingly, JAXA and NASA plan to jointly implement a recovery mission named XARM (X-ray Astronomy Recovery Mission), with the SXS, equivalent to that onboard Hitomi, as the main mission instrument. Currently the launch is planned to be made by the end of March 2021.