Fei Xie

The edge of the supernova remnant RCW 86 is where the shock wave from a star's explosion slams into the surrounding gas. The IXPE telescope looked at the southwestern part of this boundary in X-rays and tried to catch polarization — the way these rays oscillate.

May 2022. The space polarimeter IXPE, the spectroscope NuSTAR, and the monitor NICER simultaneously stared at one spot in the sky — at the black hole in the Cygnus X-1 system, where it orbits a blue supergiant in a close binary system with a period of 5.6 days.