Seminario Dr. Raffaele D’Abrusco – 19 Novembre 2020

In its 20 years (and counting) of activity, the Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO) has observed a huge variety of energetic phenomena, ranging from the shrouded formation to the violent death of stars to the rapid accretion of matter onto black holes of wildly different masses, from the glow of hot gas trapped in galaxies and cluster of galaxies to the high-voltage auroras on Jupiter, and much more. The ~16,000 scientific observations performed so far have been collected in the ever-expanding, multi-faceted archive that records, curates and makes available the full scientific inheritance produced by CXO. Building on this archive, the newly released Chandra Source Catalog 2.0 (CSC2) is both a powerful tool that enables the scientific investigation of the unique Chandra view of the Universe, and a celebration of its legacy. The CSC2 includes ~315,868 master sources and ~924,400 distinct detections extracted from all the Chandra observations obtained prior to the end of 2014. The CSC2 is a great resource to perform statistical studies on a large (by X-ray standards), rich, heterogeneous collection of sources, featuring an extensive set of uniformly calibrated properties calculated in multiple energy bands and across a broad range of source fluxes. The large area covered (~600 deg2) by CSC2 samples widely different astrophysical environments in a region of the observational parameter space that only Chandra can probe, and represents an ideal chance for the discovery of extreme, unknown types of sources. In this talk I will present the breadth of CXO scientific achievements from its first twenty year of operations. Then I will introduce the CSC2, giving an overview of its structure, the source properties and the data products available. I will also briefly touch on the range of user interfaces that allow to visualize, search, browse and obtain data from the CSC2.