In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays and used them to image the bones in his wife’s hand, kicking off a revolutionary diagnostic tool for medicine. Now two of NASA’s X-ray space telescopes have combined their imaging powers to unveil the magnetic field “bones” of a remarkable hand-shaped structure in space. Together, these telescopes reveal the behavior of a dead collapsed star that lives on through plumes of particles of energized matter and antimatter.
This is the view of MSH 15-52 from Chandra X-ray observation. It doesn’t include the IXPE X-ray and infrared observations that are included in the composite image at the top of the article. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Stanford Univ./R. Romani et al. ; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. SchmidtIXPE provides information about the electric field orientation of X-rays, determined by the magnetic field of the X-ray source. This is called X-ray polarization.
Magnetic field map in MSH 15-52. Lines represent IXPE polarization measurements, mapping the direction of the local magnetic field. The length of the bars indicates the amount of polarization. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Stanford Univ./R. Romani et al. ; NASA/MSFC ; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/DECaPS; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Schmidt
“We’ve uncovered the life history of super energetic matter and antimatter particles around the pulsar,” said co-author Niccolò Di Lalla, also of Stanford. “This teaches us about how pulsars can act as particle accelerators.”IXPE has also detected similar magnetic fields for the Vela and Crab pulsar wind nebulae, which implies that they may be surprisingly common in these objects.
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