2002/06/03 by D. Barret, Barret, D., G. Skinner +18
Physics and Astronomy · #Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/0206028
7 pages, 8 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the workshop "XEUS-studying the evolution of the hot universe" held in Garching, March 11-13, 2002, eds. G. Hasinger, Th. Boller and A. Parmar, MPE report
arxiv created 2002/06/03 · openalex publication_date 2002/06/03 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Fast X-ray timing can be used to probe strong gravity fields around collapsed objects and constrain the equation of state of dense matter in neutron stars. These studies require extremely good photon statistics. In view of the huge collecting area of its mirrors, XEUS could make a unique contribution to this field. For this reason, we propose to include a fast X-ray timing capability in the focal plane of the XEUS mirrors. We briefly outline the scientific motivation for such a capability. We compute some sensitivity estimates, which indicate that XEUS could provide better than an order of magnitude sensitivity improvement over the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer. Finally, we present a possible detector implementation, which could be an array of small size silicon drift detectors operated out of focus.