Francesco Massaro

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.

In a distant galaxy about 290 million light-years away, the object HLX-1 lies hidden. It once flared brighter than hundreds of billions of suns, but now it has quieted down. From 2018 to 2022, the Hubble, Chandra, and Swift space telescopes tracked its fading.