China tests prototype X-ray telescope that will surpass NASA's best analog

Chinese media, citing a publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, reported that local scientists have tested the new generation X-ray telescope prototype (LEIA) in working conditions, based on which the telescope under construction will surpass the best analog NASA.

The telescope, called the Lobster Eye Imager for Astronomy, is installed on the SATech-01 satellite, which was sent into space July 27 this year. Since then, the observatory has taken high-quality images, including images of the center of our galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds and the constellation of Scorpio.

The Lobster Eye Imager for Astronomy telescope, as the name implies, uses the principle of the so-called "lobster eye" structure: a series of square fields that connect to a circular light-sensitive retina. For a crab, this provides the widest viewing angle and increases light sensitivity, especially in murky water.

For the X-ray telescope, using this design for magnification is especially important because X-rays are not refracted by conventional lenses; in the X-ray range, the electromagnetic signal can only be collected and focused by reflection.

Chinese scientists, together with North Night Vision Technology, have developed a technology for producing tube-focusing systems that has no analogs in the world. Each tube pole of the future Wide Angle X-ray Telescope (WXT) will be 40 microns wide. The telescope will consist of 12 identical modules. Each module will consist of more than 30 million pores. In fact, each pore plays the role of one pixel of the image in the X-ray range.

Each of the pores is coated with an ultra-thin layer of iridium, which is no larger than one nanometer. This is done to increase the degree of reflection, and, according to Chinese scientists, no other country has such production technology. Thanks to all this, the WXT telescope will have a huge field of view. One frame will cover an area of the sky equal to the area occupied by 10,000 full moons. By comparison, NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope can observe less than one full moon in a single frame.

The WXT telescope is scheduled to launch into space in 2023. The Chinese started building it in the spring of this year, although it was planned to be done earlier and due to strict anti-epidemic measures in the country, it started a year late. The telescope will be launched into space by the Einstein Probe spacecraft, a joint project between China and the European Space Agency. The Europeans will install their own, but narrowly focused and very sensitive FXT (Follow-up X-ray Telescope) at the observatory.

Thanks to China's WXT telescope, which has unprecedented resolution in the X-ray range, astronomers will study events in space in a new way. The telescope will be able to simultaneously see both distant and faint events, as well as bright events of very large area. We are talking about such phenomena as the interaction of black holes, neutron stars, the birth of supernovae, etc. According to experts, for the world of X-ray astronomy, the launch of WXT will be equivalent to the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.