The very first scientific image from NASA’s new X-ray hunting probe IXPE has been released by NASA, which shows Cassiopeia A, the remnant of a star that exploded in 17 th century.
The Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) probe (launched on December 9 2021) has snapped its first science images of Cassiopeia A. The main mission of IXPE is to observe objects like black holes and neutron stars, such as Magnetars and pulsars.
The most striking feature of the very first science image is its magenta color. In reality, it doesn’t actually look like that in visible light, but this color represents X-ray radiation. In fact, the more saturated is the color, the more intense will be the X-ray light.
The bluelightning in the image represent high energy X-rays seen by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. IXPE probe, a collaboration between NASA and the Italian Space Agency, orbits 600 kms above Earth’s equator.
Cassiopeia A or Cas A is a supernova remnant of a massive star located 11,000 light years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. Astronomers estimate that, before the collapse, the star was about five times the mass of the Sun just before it exploded. The star blew up 11,000 years before but the light from the explosion took 11,000 years to reach us.
Cas A is the youngest known supernova remnant in our Milky Way and is the brightest extra solar radio source in the sky at frequencies above 1GHz.
One more interesting thing about Cassiopeia A is that the expanding shell has a temperature of around 30 Million K and it’s expanding at a fast rate of 4000-6000 km/s.
In 2013, astronomers detected Phosphorus in Cassiopeia A, which confirmed that this element is produced in Supernova.