NASA X-Ray Mission Gets Fresh Look at 2,000-Year-Old Supernova

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 full image combines IXPE's data with legacy observations from two other X-ray telescopes: NASA's Chandra and the ESA (European Space Agency) XMM-Newton telescope. 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 (NOIRLab).