The Mystery at the Center of the Heart
An amazing photo showing the aftermath of a 2,000-year-old star explosion reveals something never seen before: astronomers believe the blue dot at the center may be a neutron star, less than 20 kilometers wide. Space.com reports:
Embedded in the heart of a supernova remnant 10,000 light-years away is a stellar object the likes of which astronomers have never seen before in our galaxy.
At first glance, the object looks like a densely packed stellar corpse known as a neutron star surrounded by a bubble of ejected stellar material, exactly what would be expected in the wake of a supernova explosion.
However, a closer 24.5-hour examination with the European Space Agency’s XMM Newton X-ray satellite reveals that the energetic X-ray emissions of the blue, point-like object cycles every 6.7 hours—tens of thousands of times longer than expected for a freshly created neutron star.
It is behavior that’s more commonly seen in neutron stars that have been around for several million years, researchers say.
The mystery is fully explored in the July 7 issue of the journal Science.
