After two decades in space, the world’s leading x-ray telescope is still revealing new secrets of the cosmos
BLAST SCENE Deep in the heart of the Crab Nebula lies a highly magnetized, rapidly rotating neutron star that was produced when a massive star exploded as a supernova, which was first observed in the year 1054.* This multiwavelength image reveals the debris from the blast: x-rays are shown in purple, ultraviolet light in blue, visible in green, infrared in yellow and radio light in red. The x-ray emission, closest to the neutron star, is dominated by light released by charged particles that were accelerated to high energies by the star's rotation. X-ray: NASA, CXC and SAO; Optical: NASA and STSsI; Infrared: NASA, JPL and Caltech; Radio: NSF, NRAO and VLA; Ultraviolet: ESA and XMM-Newton
