Stunning space image shows glowing clouds of gas swirling around an exploded star

Thursday, 17 February 2022

This image of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A combines some of the first X-ray data collected by Nasa’s IXPE, shown in magenta, with high-energy X-ray data from Nasa’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, in blue.

If you’ve ever wondered what the remnants of an exploded star look like, Nasa has just helped fill the void.

The space agency has released a stunning image of magenta-coloured gas, glowing and swirling about what remains of a supernova deep in space.

The captivating imagery is of Cassiopeia A – an exploded star located about 11,000 light years away from Earth.

The images were taken via Nasa’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), that was launched last December. The explorer, which has three telescopes, is on a mission to observe space curiosities like black holes and neutron stars in X-ray light.

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Cassiopeia A is believed to have exploded in the 17th century, and shock waves from the explosion have swept up surrounding gas, heating it to high temperatures and accelerating cosmic ray particles to make a cloud that glows in X-ray light, Nasa said in a statement.

The supernova has been photographed before, including by another Nasa space shuttle called Chandra that launched in 1999.

Chandra’s X-ray imagery revealed, for the first time, that there was a compact object in the centre of the supernova remnant, which may be a black hole or neutron star, Nasa said.

Through the new imagery by IXPE, scientists hope to learn more about the “very beautiful” supernova.

“It demonstrates IXPE’s potential to gain new, never-before-seen information about Cassiopeia A, which is under analysis right now,” said Martin Weisskopf, the IXPE principal investigator based in the US.

A key measurement that scientists will make with IXPE is called polarisation, a way of looking at how X-ray light is oriented as it travels through space.

The polarisation of light contains clues to the environment where the light originated. IXPE’s instruments also measure the energy, the time of arrival, and the position in the sky of the X-rays from cosmic sources.

With polarisation data from Cassiopeia A, IXPE will allow scientists to see, for the first time, how the amount of polarisation varies across the supernova remnant, which is about 10 light years in diameter.

Researchers are currently working with the data to create the first-ever X-ray polarisation map of the object. This will reveal new clues about how X-rays are produced at Cassiopeia A.

“IXPE’s future polarisation images should unveil the mechanisms at the heart of this famous cosmic accelerator,” said Roger Romani, an IXPE co-investigator.