NASA X-Ray Mission Gets Fresh Look at 2,000-Year-Old Supernova
NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission has made a new observation of a supernova, RCW 86, helping to complete a more complete picture of what other telescopes have observed.
When astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory previously targeted RCW 86, they found that a large “cavity” region around the system was leading the supernova to expand faster than expected. The low-density cavity region could also have led to the unique shape of RCW 86. Now, IXPE has observed the outer edge of this supernova, where its expansion is suspected to have stopped at the edge of the “cavity”, creating the reflected shock effect highlighted in purple.
The full image combines data from the IXPE with observations from two other X-ray telescopes: NASA’s Chandra telescope and the ESA (European Space Agency) XMM-Newton telescope. Yellow represents low-energy X-rays, while blue represents high-energy X-rays detected by Chandra and XMM-Newton. The star field in the image is from the National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab).
The IXPE mission, which continues to provide unprecedented data enabling groundbreaking discoveries about celestial objects across the universe, is a joint mission of NASA and the Italian Space Agency with scientific partners and collaborators in 12 countries. It is led by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. BAE Systems, Inc., headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, manages spacecraft operations in collaboration with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Learn more about IXPE’s current mission here:
science.nasa.gov/mission/ixpe
