Visualization

XIM is a virtual X-ray observatory of numerical simulations of galaxy clusters and other sources of diffuse thermal emission. It can be used to generate data cubes for Chandra and can be customized for other telescopes as well. For example, it can be used to evaluate the capabilities of future missions, like Athena and Astro-H.

XIM is a set of IDL tools designed to turn standard gridded output from a hydrodynamical simulation into a virtual X-ray observation. The output from XIM is a spectral data cube.

This package contains the modules necessary to perform X-ray spectral simulations:

  • Athena, IXO and Chandra on-axis response matrices
  • an interface to the APEC/APED thermal emission code
  • an interface to MARX for sophisticated Chandra ray tracing simulations
  • an interface for spectral models other than thermal
  • output as IDL data files and fits events files

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