The eROSITA X-ray telescope makes public the largest ever catalogue of high-energy cosmic sources!

The @eROSITA_SRG consortium has unleashed the colossal first #eROSITA X-ray telescope data release to the public with a record-breaking 900,000 cosmic sources & ~50 scientific publications.

This image show half of the X-ray sky, projected onto a circle (so-called Zenit Equal Area projection) with the centre of the Milky Way on the left and the galactic plane running horizontally. Photons have been colour-coded according to their energy (red for energies 0.3-0.6 keV, green for 0.6-1 keV, blue for 1-2.3 keV).
© MPE, J. Sanders for the eROSITA consortium

Among the 900,000 sources more than 700,000 are supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies, 180 000 X-ray emitting stars in our own Milky Way, 12,000 clusters of galaxies, plus a small number of other exotic classes of sources like X-ray emitting binary stars, supernova remnants, pulsars, and other objects.!

In these two images, a special image processing algorithm is used to separate extended features (left) from point sources (right).
© MPE, J. Sanders for the eROSITA consortium

Read the full press-release here: https://www.mpe.mpg.de/7989698/news20240131?c=260780