Swift’s detection caught the attention of astronomers
NASA shared a fascinating image of a supernova captured by the Chandra X-ray Observatory telescope. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration shared the image on its Instagram page showing the rotating neutron stars, detected in 2016. It exhibits properties of a highly magnetized neutron star or magnetar, but its inferred spin period is thousands of times longer than any pulsar. ever observed, NASA said in a press release.
The composite image shows the remains of a supernova located about 9,000 light-years from Earth, in three bands of X-ray light. In this image, Chandra’s lowest-energy X-rays are red, the middle band is green and higher energy X-rays are blue. The bright blue X-ray source in the middle of RCW 103 is 1E 1613, according to the press release.
Look at the image here:
NASA in its Instagram caption reads: “Our Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory telescope and several other X-ray telescopes observed one of the most extreme rotating neutron stars or pulsars ever detected in 2016. The Swift Observatory helps detect bursts of gamma rays: large gamma radiation”. pulses that form when a massive star collapses, creating a black hole, using optical, ultraviolet, and X-ray light.”
He further added: “This composite image shows the remains of a supernova, about 9,000 light-years from Earth, in three bands of X-ray light detected by @NASACHandraXRay, with low-energy X-rays in red, medium in green, and the higher in blue”.
“Image Description: Blank space as black as #Midnight is dotted with tiny white stars in the image. A rotating maze of blue, green, yellow, purple and red colors forms the center of the photo surrounding the star of neutrons in bright blue,” NASA wrote.
The image has accumulated several likes and comments. Social media users were stunned after seeing the image, with one user writing, “Space Midnight should be a new color.” Another commented: “I see what you did there NASA!” The third commented: “This is so beautiful. Our universe can be so cinematic,” commented the third.
Swift’s detection caught astronomers’ attention because the source exhibited extremely fast and intense fluctuations on a millisecond time scale, similar to other known magnetars. These exotic objects possess the most powerful magnetic fields in the Universe, billions of times more than those observed in the Sun, and can erupt with enormous amounts of energy, NASA said in a statement.
