The largest survey of the hard X-ray sky - ever!

The hard X-ray sky gives an ever-changing view of the most energetic processes in the universe. The IBIS telescope on the INTEGRAL satellite and BAT telescope on the Swift satellite have been studying the hard X-ray sky for 20 years and have built a huge archive of observations. This work will combine these complementary datasets to make the most sensitive map of the hard X-ray sky ever produced. This will require new techniques to search for the faintest sources (these tell us about the object populations) and the bright but short-lived transient events that signal key events in the lifetimes of individual galaxies and stellar systems. The INTEGRAL and Swift archive contain 1000s (maybe much more) of events such as Supernovae, Black Hole Novae, Tidal Disruption Events, Gamma-Ray Bursts, Soft Gamma Repeaters coming from black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs. This project will develop and deploy new machine learning tools to search for transient events and improve the sensitivity to faint persistent sources. This is the first step towards a catalogue of sources that scientists will use for decades to come. The survey will also produce high-level data products such as spectra and light curves to see how the sources have evolved over two decades.