Welcome on the WFXT Transient calculator web service intro page!
This is an offered service within the DAME Cloud, maintained by the author M. Paolillo.
Click here to go directly to the WFXT page
The Wide Field X-Ray Telescope (WFXT) is a medium-class mission designed to be 2-orders-of-magnitude more sensitive than any previous or planned X-ray mission for large area surveys and to match in sensitivity the next generation of wide-area optical, IR and radio surveys. Using an innovative wide-field X-ray optics design, WFXT provides a field of view of 1 square degree (10x Chandra) with an angular resolution of 5′′ (Half Energy Width, HEW) nearly constant over the entire field, and a large collecting area (1 m^2, >10x Chandra) over the 0.1-7 keV band. WFXT’s low-Earth orbit also minimizes the particle background. In five years of operation, WFXT will carry out three extragalactic surveys:
- WIDE survey will cover most of the extragalactic sky (~20,000 deg^2) at ~500 times the sensitivity, and twenty times better angular resolution of the ROSAT All Sky Survey;
- MEDIUM survey will map ~3000 deg^2 to deep Chandra or XMM - COSMOS sensitivity;
- DEEP survey will probe ~100 deg^2, or ~1000 times the area of the Chandra Deep Fields, to the deepest Chandra sensitivity.
The feasibility study has been supported through an ASI grant on the Italian side, while the whole project is currently under scrutiny by the 2010 US Decadal Survey, and has received encouraging comments so far.
Within the Italian WFXT community (see http://wfxt.na.infn.it/ for more links and details), the Naples groups concentrated on predicting the mission capabilities in the time domain. While not designed to be a monitoring mission, its characteristics and the proposed observing strategy, make it suitable to conduct timing studies for an unprecedented number of moderate and high redshift AGNs, as well as to discover and constrain rates and properties of distant, faint and rare X-ray populations such as X-ray Flashes/faint GRBs, Tidal Disruption Events, ULXs, Type-I bursts etc.
In order to allow the whole scientific community to appreciate, explore and comment the WFXT capabilities in this field, we implemented an online version of the WFXT transient simulator:
This tool allows, although under simplistic assumptions and a preliminary mission design, to estimate the number of transient and variable sources that can be detected by WFXT within the 3 main planned extragalactic surveys, with a given significante threshold.
DAME is a collaboration between INAF OACN, Dip. of Physics Science of University Federico II and Caltech Institute aimed at designing and developing instruments and tools for scientific data mining, based on information and comunication technology, funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as by the European project VOTECH (Virtual Observatory Technological Infrastructures) and by the Italian PON-S.Co.P.E.