X-ray emission from early-type galaxies

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent progress in understanding X-ray emissions from early-type galaxies, highlighting advances in identifying stellar, hot gas, and nuclear contributions, and discusses future prospects with wide-area X-ray surveys.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent observational progress and outlines future directions for studying X-ray emissions in early-type galaxies.

Findings

Improved understanding of X-ray sources in early-type galaxies.

Identification of hot gas, stellar sources, and galactic nuclei as main contributors.

Discussion of future survey prospects with WFXT.

Abstract

The past decade has seen a large progress in the X-ray investigation of early-type galaxies of the local universe, and first attempts have been made to reach redshifts z>0 for these objects, thanks to the high angular resolution and sensitivity of the satellites Chandra and XMM-Newton. Major advances have been obtained in our knowledge of the three separate contributors to the X-ray emission, that are the stellar sources, the hot gas and the galactic nucleus. Here a brief outline of the main results is presented, pointing out the questions that remain open, and finally discussing the prospects to solve them with a wide area X-ray survey mission such as WFXT.