Experimental Astronomy - Published Special Issue “Science with the Transient High Energy Sky and Early Universe Surveyor (THESEUS)”
February 2022
We are pleased to present the Special Issue “Science with the Transient High Energy Sky and Early Universe Surveyor (THESEUS)”, with Guest Editors Andrea Santangelo, Lorenzo Amati, Paul O’Brien, Diego Götz, and Enrico Bozzo.
The THESEUS mission concept, developed in recent years by a large European collaboration involving also scientists from worldwide, aims at fully exploiting the unique and breakthrough potentialities of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) for investigating the Early Universe and advancing Multi-Messenger Astrophysics, while simultaneously vastly increasing the discovery space of high energy transient phenomena over the entirety of cosmic history. THESEUS will achieve these ambitious goals through a step change in capabilities for wide-area detection and characterisation of transients over a very broad energy band (0.3 keV to 10 MeV), including on-board near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy, and is designed to be at the forefront of these science fields in the 2030s.
THESEUS will be inherently a mission with huge synergy with the premier future observatories, providing simultaneous wide sky monitoring, rapid follow-up and real-time triggers. From ELT to ATHENA, CTA to Einstein Telescope, the Rubin Observatory to the Roman Space Telescope, the science returns from combining observations with multiple facilities is a classic case of “the whole being much greater than the sum of the parts”. A broad range of other science programmes will also be enabled by THESEUS, including using observations of GRB emission as laboratories of ultra-relativistic matter, providing tests of fundamental physics, such as Lorentz invariance, and gathering statistics on large populations of other high energy sources and transients. Thus, THESEUS data will be of interest to a very wide user community, including through its open guest-observer programme.
THESEUS is one of the three mission concepts selected by ESA in 2018 for a Phase A study as candidate next M5 mission, for a launch in 2032. The study, conducted from Fall 2018 to Spring 2021 by the THESEUS consortium and the ESA study Team, has led to detailed, workable and well qualified solutions for the spacecraft, its payload and operations. It has also demonstrated the technical and programmatic feasibility of accomplishing the core science goals with this mission concept.
Access the complete special issue through the following web page:
https://link.springer.com/journal/10686/volumes-and-issues/52-3 (this opens in a new tab)
The complete Special Issue is available for free access until Apr 3rd 2022, but most of its papers are permanently open access.
Our esteemed Guest Editors are: