Jacco Vink

About 25,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Sagittarius, a dense veil wraps around the neutron star GX 13+1. It scatters X-ray photons the way fog scatters streetlight, and for a long time it hid the source's true power from astronomers.

When a massive star exhausts its thermonuclear fuel, its core collapses and the outer layers are blown off in a colossal explosion — a supernova (a term coined by Fritz Zwicky while studying these catastrophes).

When a massive star runs out of fuel, it collapses and explodes, scattering the material from its interior across space. The remnant of such an explosion, Cassiopeia A, has long been known to astronomers for its lopsided appearance: bright clumps of material are scattered unevenly.

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.

The Perseus galaxy cluster is a giant metropolis of thousands of star islands, bathed in an invisible ocean of scorching gas. Like urban smog, this gas preserves traces of all the chemical factories that have operated in galaxies for billions of years: supernova explosions that scatter freshly forged atoms across the surroundings.