NBIA Colloquium by Rashid Sunyaev

Speaker: Rashid Sunyaev (Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics and Russian Academy of Sciences)

Title: The map of the entire Sky in X-rays and its variability over time.

Abstract: In this colloquium, I will present a map containing millions of accreting supermassive black holes, half a million stars with active coronae, and 50,000 clusters of galaxies filled with dark matter and diffused hot gas. This map demonstrates strong variability of X-ray sources on different time scales from the giant explosions in our Galaxy and the Tidal Disruptions of stars near supermassive black holes in Active Galactic nuclei. This map was created using the data of the whole sky scans by SRG Orbital Observatory with eRosita and ART-XC X-Ray grazing incidence telescopes aboard.

SRG works on the halo orbit around the second Lagrange point similar to the orbit of the James Webb Telescope 1.5 Mln km away from the Earth.

Brief bio-sketch:  Rashid Sunyaev obtained his PhD from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in 1968. He became a professor at MIPT in 1974. Sunyaev was the head of the High Energy Astrophysics Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences and has been the chief scientist of the Academy's Space Research Institute since 1992. He has also been a director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany since 1996, and Maureen and John Hendricks Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since 2010.

Rashid Sunyaev has made major contributions in the fields of physical cosmology and high-energy astrophysics. His current research interests include the cosmological recombination of hydrogen and helium, the physics of gas accretion onto neutron stars and black holes, and the problem of matter and radiation interaction under extreme astrophysical conditions.

Select Honors and Awards
1995 – Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society
2003 – Gruber Prize in Cosmology
2008 – Crafoord Prize for decisive contributions to high-energy astrophysics and cosmology.
2008 – Karl Schwarzschild Medal of the German Astronomische Gesellschaft
2019 – Dirac Medal, (ICTP) jointly with Viatcheslav Mukhanov and Alexei Starobinsky
2023 – Max Planck Medal of the DPG

There will be refreshments after the talk!