My name is Drew Morris, and I am a senior at Pine Crest School in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. This research was conducted at the University of Miami.

Diffuse X-ray Emissions from the Local Galaxy (DXL)

The Local Hot Bubble (LHB) is a peanut-shaped bubble of disperse, superheated hydrogen and helium with an approximate diameter of 300 light years that was formed by a cluster of supernovae which exploded around 10 million years ago, encasing our Solar System. The LHB emits soft (< 1keV) x-rays that, up until this point, couldn’t be differentiated from the soft x-rays produced by Solar Wind Charge eXchange (SWCX). SWCX occurs when ionized particles found in solar wind interact with the neutral matter in the interplanetary medium consisting mostly of hydrogen and helium. The Diffuse X-ray emission from the Local Galaxy (DXL) mission is aimed at differentiating between x-rays that come from the Diffuse X-ray Background (DXB) and the LHB from those that are the byproduct of SWCX. DXL does this by taking multiple scans of the sky from above Earth’s atmosphere, which is where most of the DXB’s soft x-rays are absorbed, making them invisible to telescopes on the ground. The DXL telescope consists of electrical components in the back of the instrument followed by an ionization chamber for the x-rays to enter, with a specially-made chemical window film, nickel mesh, honeycomb-shaped collimator, and electron-deflecting magnets on the top of the instrument. An array of carbon, boron, and fluorine filters overlaid on the counters along with temporal and positional variation of the x-rays allowed for x-ray differentiation. Through this research, it was found that in the ¼ keV band, SWCX contributed a maximum of 36% of DXL’s x-ray readings.