Collaborative Research: Dust Echo Tomography: New Diagnostics for Galactic Dust and Magnetic Fields

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Black holes and neutron stars in the plane of our Galaxy are known to emit flashes of X-rays. When these X-rays travel through the Galaxy, they can bounce off interstellar dust particles, creating a ring-like echo surrounding the source. Over the past decade, the discovery of several such echoes has opened a new field of study called “X-ray Dust Tomography”. The study of these echoes provides new insights into the properties of interstellar dust, which is a key building block of stars and planets. The goal of this project is to advance the understanding of X-ray dust echoes and to connect them with observations by optical and radio telescopes. Investigator Heinz will build on previous experience with life-long learning programs and develop a 20-hour public exploration series on multi-messenger astronomy. Heinz plans to film the new lectures and make them available online as a self-contained web course. The investigators will develop, test, optimize, and publish a constrained, joint 2-dimensional deconvolution algorithm that will allow the joint analysis of an arbitrary number of observations of dust echoes with arbitrary signal-to-noise. The algorithm will be applicable to a wide range of echo phenomena. The work will enable significantly more sensitive analysis of past echoes and more flexible and sensitive future observations. The investigators we will further develop a new method to measure grain alignment and thus magnetic field orientation from X-ray dust echoes and infra-red extinction maps of dust clouds.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.