The Cosmos with Supernova Remnant 1E 0102.2-7219

This composite picture created from images from several space- and ground-based telescopes tells the story of the hunt for an elusive missing object hidden amid a complex tangle of gaseous filaments in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy approximately 200,000 light-years from us outside the Milky Way Galaxy. The reddish background image comes from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and reveals the wisps of gas forming the supernova remnant 1E 0102.2-7219 in green. The red ring with a dark center is from the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the blue and purple images are from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The blue spot at the center of the red ring is an isolated neutron star with a weak magnetic field, the first identified outside the Milky Way.

 

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