X-ray spectroscopy is one of our main tools for studying the physical and chemical properties of the intracluster, intragroup, circumgalactic, and intergalactic media, and understanding their connection, interaction, and evolution.
After more than 20 years of operation of Chandra and XMM-Newton, and a decade of Suzaku being in orbit, we have learned a great deal about the physics and chemistry of galaxy cluster cores, even reaching out to the outskirts of a few of the nearest brightest systems. I will first review some highlights of these past results, and then discuss how ongoing and upcoming sensitive wide-area surveys and the higher spectral resolution integral field spectroscopy capabilities on future satellites will push our study of gaseous haloes to new frontiers.
BIO
Dr. Aurora Simionescu got her PhD from Ludwig Maximilians University Munich in 2009. She was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics during 2007-2008, an Einstein Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University from 2009 to 2013, an International Top Young Fellow at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) during 2013-2016, and Associate Professor at JAXA during 2016-2018, then she worked as Scientist A at SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, became a tenured Senior Researcher at SRON since this September.
Dr. Aurora Simionescu's main research interests are related to the physics of the hot plasma in clusters of galaxies, the largest virialized objects in the universe. She focuses on the physics of the X-ray emitting gas in clusters of galaxies, from the smallest to the largest scales. During her PhD, she studied how the central black hole in the brightest cluster galaxy interacts with the intracluster medium; later on, she focused more on the outer edges of clusters of galaxies, trying to understand how these objects grow by accreting matter from the surrounding large-scale structure.
Host: Wei Cui