[imagesource: NASA/ IANS]

NASA has quite a few “X-ray eyes” out and about in the universe, giving us a view of some of the most extreme and mysterious space bodies that exist in our night’s sky.

AKA supernovae, black holes, and neutron stars.

NASA’s newest explorer, the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) (pictured above), launched in December 2021 and has just sent back some images of the remains of a dying star.

These give us a glimpse of the famous remnant of the supernova Cassiopeia A that exploded in the 17th century, 11 000 light-years away from Earth.

You can see purple gas clouds around the supernova, which was created when shock waves from the explosion heated surrounding gas to incredibly high temperatures, accelerating high energy particles called cosmic rays.

Those clouds glow in X-ray light:

Image: NASA/CXC/SAO/IXPE

Here’s an explanation of that image from SciTech Daily:

…the saturation of the magenta color corresponds to the intensity of X-ray light observed by IXPE.

It overlays high energy X-ray data, shown in blue, from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory [launched in 1999].

Chandra and IXPE, with different kinds of detectors, capture different levels of angular resolution, or sharpness.

The Chandra telescope found a compact object in the centre of the supernova remnant, which may be a black hole or neutron star.

Paolo Soffitta, the Italian principal investigator for IXPE at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome, called the IXPE image of Cassiopeia A “bellissima“, adding that he and his team are looking forward to “analysing the polarimetry data to learn even more about this supernova remnant”, reported CNN.

Next up is an IXPE image that maps the intensity of X-rays coming from Cassiopeia A, with colours ranging from cool purple and blue to red and hot white, corresponding with the increasing brightness of the X-rays:

Image: NASA

A big job of the IXPE is to measure polarisation, which is a way of looking at how X-ray light is oriented as it travels through space:

X-rays are highly energetic waves of light that are born from extremes. In space, these intense conditions include powerful magnetic fields, collisions between objects, explosions, scorching temperatures and rapid rotations.

The polarisation of light can provide clues about the environment where the star’s light originated from, helping scientists better understand the remnants of exploded stars and everything that comes with it.

[sources:cnn&scitechdaily]