NASA X-Ray Mission Gets Fresh Look at 2,000-Year-Old Supernova
NASA’s IXPE observed the outer rim of the supernova remnant highlighted in purple in the inset. Data from IXPE is combined with data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton. The yellow represents low-energy X-rays, while blue shows high-energy X-rays detected by Chandra and XMM-Newton. The starfield in the image comes from the National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOILab). NASA/ X-ray: Chandra: NASA/CXC/SAO, XMM: ESA/XMM-NEWTON, IXPE: NASA/MSFC; Optical: NSF/NOIRLab; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) mission has taken a new observation of a supernova, RCW 86, helping fill in a fuller picture of what other telescopes have observed. When astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory previously targeted RCW 86, they discovered that a large “cavity” region around the system led the supernova to expand more rapidly than expected. The low-density cavity region...
