Finding new and extreme objects in the Universe

le 18 septembre 2026, 10h45 à 12h45, Natalie Webb, salle Jules Verne, OMP, site Belin

Summary: Thanks to large surveys such as those carried out with Gaia, Pan-STARRS, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), 2MASS, NVSS, XMM-Newton and Chandra, we have catalogued many stars and galaxies, as well as exotic objects, especially when we observe at high energies. These include black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs, supernova explosions, gamma-ray bursts, black holes destroying stars, as well as clusters of galaxies. During this seminar I will present the European Space Agency’s X-ray satellite XMM-Newton and its X-ray catalogue, 5XMM. I will discuss some of the exotic objects that we have found in the catalogue, such as intermediate mass black holes, tidal disruption events, ultra-luminous X-ray sources, and pulsars, and how we can find others. I will present new and recent surveys that push our data sets into the « big data » domain and I will discuss how machine learning can help us better understand these enormous volumes of data.