High-Resolution X-ray Spectroscopy - Instrumentation, Data Analysis, and Science

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton Observatory have been the pioneering satellites for studying the Universe with X-rays and the cornerstone of X-ray spectroscopy since their launches more than 20 years ago. The onboard gratings provide us a unique opportunity to distinguish individual spectral lines from different atoms thanks to their high energy resolutions. Enormous discoveries have been achieved by these two missions when observing a variety of X-ray-emitting astronomical objects, such as black holes, supernova remnants, clusters of galaxies, and stars. However, the data are limited to fairly bright X-ray sources. The recent JAXA's mission Hitomi opened a new window of high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy thanks to its onboard X-ray calorimeter. Although this mission was shortly terminated due to a mishap, Hitomi left behind a few sets of observations awaiting more data mining. 

The first half of this book introduces the history of high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy and different generations of X-ray spectrometers. A tutorial guide on how to reduce, analyze, and understand the astronomical data from Chandra, XMM-Newton, and Hitomi is also included. The second half of the book reviews past results obtained by the high-resolution spectrometers on these missions on multiple topics and discusses possible discoveries by upcoming missions in the next decade.

Cosimo Bambi:
Cosimo Bambi is currently Xie Xide Junior Chair Professor at the Department of Physics at Fudan University. He received the Laurea degree from Florence University in 2003 and the PhD degree from Ferrara University in 2007. He worked as a postdoctoral research scholar at Wayne State University, IPMU/The University of Tokyo, and LMU Munich. He joined Fudan University at the end of 2012 under the 1000 Young Talents Program. His main research interests focus on theoretical and observational studies on black holes. He has published about 200 papers on high impact factor refereed journals as first or corresponding author and has over 10,000 citations. He has published several books with Springer, either as author and editor. He has received a number of awards, including the Magnolia Gold Award in 2022 and the Magnolia Silver Award in 2018 from the Municipality of Shanghai, the International Excellent Young Scientists Award from the National Natural Science Foundation of China in 2022, and the Xu Guangqi Prize from the Embassy of Italy in Beijing in 2018.
Jiachen Jiang:
Jiachen Jiang received his bachelor's degree in physics from Fudan University in 2016 and his PhD in Astronomy from Cambridge University in 2020. He worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Tsinghua University and is currently a Leverhulme Trust/Isaac Newton Trust Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge University. His research focuses on multi-wavelength observations of accreting black holes, including stellar-mass black holes in binary systems and supermassive black holes in the centre of galaxies.