SOXS@NTT

SOXS@NTT

Son Of X–Shooter – A spectrograph for NTT

NEWS for SOXS

2024/12/06 – ESO’s OK arrives: Soxs ready for Chile – INAF-guided spectrograph Soxs – acronym for Son of X-Shooter – obtained the coveted PAE, or “Preliminary Acceptance in Europe”, from the European Southern Observatory: the instrument has been approved and can now be shipped to the telescope for which it is intended, the New Technology Telescope of La Silla, in Chile – To learn more read the article below where you will find a comment by the Principal Investigator and our astrophysicist Sergio Campana:

ESO’s OK arrives: Soxs ready for Chile – on Media INAF

SHORT DESCRIPTION

SOXS is a spectrograph (i.e. an instrument that splits light into its colors) with a wide band, from ultraviolet (UV) to near infrared (NIR). It was selected in 2015 by ESO (European Southern Observatory, the European body for astronomy in the southern hemisphere) to be mounted on the NTT telescope in Chile. SOXS is being built by an international consortium led by INAF (50%) with several international partners (Israel, United Kingdom, Finland, Chile and Denmark).

SOXS will enable the tracking of transient and variable sources in the sky by providing a key spectroscopic partner and becoming the main follow-up instrument for these phenomena in the southern hemisphere.

Transients only last for a limited period of time. The rate at which these phenomena are discovered continues to increase due to increasingly powerful telescopes. It is therefore of fundamental importance that transients, once discovered, are quickly targeted and followed within minutes or hours by dedicated optical telescopes. Designed to see in optical and near-infrared wavelengths, SOXS will be able to achieve this

SOXS, installed on the NTT, will track a variety of transients spanning all distance scales and branches of astronomy, including fast alerts (such as GRBs and gravitational waves), medium-term alerts (such as supernovae and X-ray transients), and fixed-time events (such as a minor planet or asteroid flyby). It will also have the ability to observe exoplanet transits, active galactic nuclei and blazars, tidal disturbance events, fast radio bursts, and more!

In recent years, optical surveys have discovered new classes of supernovae and rare transients. SOXS will help us deepen our understanding of these new transients. We will study in detail the destruction of stars by supermassive black holes and try to identify the counterparts of gravitational wave sources or gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) in the near Universe up to its edges when the Universe was only several hundred million years old.

But how does SOXS work?
The instrument separates incoming white light into a spectrum, where the position on the detector corresponds to a given wavelength. The presence of emission and absorption lines – which appear as bright or dark lines in the spectrum, respectively – is a clear indicator of specific elements, allowing us to study the chemical composition and the blueshift (approach) or redshift (recession) of the source. For cosmological sources – that is, sources outside our galaxy – this allows us to determine how far away they are.

ROLE OF THE OBSERVATORY

The INAF-Brera Astronomical Observatory is the nerve center of the project. In our clean room we have integrated the infrared branch of SOXS.
We have almost finished developing the software to generate the night-by-night observing schedule so that we can act dynamically and automatically on new transients, and we are contributing to the writing of the data reduction software.
When we enter the operational phase, the observatory will be the hub of the instrument operations.

As a reward for building the instrument, ESO will provide the SOXS Consortium with 180 observing nights per year for 5 years (900 nights). This guaranteed time will be used by the Consortium entirely for the study of transient and variable sources in the sky.

In addition to building the instrument, the Consortium will also manage the operations of the NTT telescope. This means that each night the Consortium will have to tell the telescope what to observe, dynamically combining the sources it wants to observe from SOXS with the sources coming from the remaining ESO time. The SOXS schedule will be flexible and updated daily to respond to fast alerts, with scientists always ready (24/7) to respond to new transients.

It is a great commitment and responsibility, but it is also a great opportunity to better and immediately manage the new challenges that the sky may present us.

At the moment (June 2024), SOXS is completely assembled in the INAF laboratories in Padua and has begun preliminary acceptance by ESO.

SOXS is expected to see first light in early 2025.

PERSONALE OSSERVATORIO COINVOLTO

Sergio Campana – Principal Investigator – sergio.campana AT inaf.it
Paolo D’Avanzo – Instrument Scientist – paolo.davanzo AT inaf.it
Matteo Aliverti – Mechanics WP Manager – matteo.aliverti AT inaf.it
Matteo Genoni – Instrument Model WP Manager – matteo.genoni AT inaf.it
Marco Landoni – Scheduler WP Manager – marco.landoni AT inaf.it

TIMELINE

2015 – 2030

WEBSITE

SOXS

CONTACT

CREDITS

Web page content: S. Campana