ESA Science & Technology - Workshop 'High-resolution X-ray spectroscopic software and tools'

Start date: 13 May 2016
Address: ESA-ESAC, Villanueva de la Cañada, Madrid, Spain

Our knowledge about cosmic plasmas and astrophysical objects has considerably improved in the last fifteen years thanks to the X-ray grating spectrometers on board XMM-Newton and Chandra. A new big leap will occur with new calorimeter facilities, in 2016 with the launch of ASTRO-H and in the next decade with ATHENA.

This two-day workshop will concentrate on the software packages dedicated to high-resolution X-ray spectral fitting (e.g, ISIS, Sherpa, SPEX, XSPEC) and specific tools for X-ray plasma diagnostics for various physical conditions (e.g., non-equilibrium ionization, collisional ionization equilibrium, photo-ionization equilibrium, charge transfer).