e-ASTROGAM, a wide-field observatory for the MeV / sub-GeV energy band

Thursday 18 Feb 2016, 10:30 → 11:30 Europe/Madrid

Seminar Room (IFAE)

ASTROGAM is a gamma-ray space mission that was proposed to ESA's call for medium missions M4, with a payload mass of only 300 kg. An extended version with a larger mass and thus better sensitivity, e-ASTROGAM, will be proposed to M5, willing to do the observation of the Universe with unprecedented sensitivity in the energy range between 0.3 and more than 100 MeV. The core science is focused on a) the mysteries of the Galactic centre and inner Galaxy, including the supermassive black hole activity, the Fermi Bubbles, the origin of the Galactic positrons, and dark matter signatures in a new energy window; b) nucleosynthesis and propagation of heavy elements in our Galaxy; c) activity from extreme particle accelerators, including disk-jet transitions in active galactic nuclei and the origin of the extragalactic gamma-ray background. The ASTROGAM payload consists of a single instrument for the simultaneous detection of Compton and pair-producing gamma-ray events.