Satellite mission finds mysterious celestial object
The EP's advanced Wide-field X-ray Telescope and Follow-up X-ray Telescope enable it to detect X-rays from faint, transient sources that other satellites often miss. Yuan noted that the EP's field of view and detection capabilities offer sensitivity and spatial resolution that is 10 times better than existing international equipment.
Operating 600 kilometers above the Earth's surface, the EP focuses on X-ray sources that could shed light on black holes, gravitational waves and other cosmic events predicted by Albert Einstein's theories. It has identified 60 confirmed transient bodies since its launch in January, including white dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, gamma-ray bursts and more than 480 stellar flares.
"These findings illustrate EP's major impact on science," said Paul O'Brien, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.
The satellite also observed a distant gamma-ray burst, capturing its early soft X-ray emissions and offering new insights into the universe's poorly understood reionization era, a period in the early days of the universe during which neutral hydrogen atoms were reionized by intense radiation.
