NASA | CXC | IXPE | 2023 Apr 10
On Feb. 22, 1971, a sounding rocket lifted off from Wallops Island, Virginia, with specialized sensors aimed at the Crab Nebula, a bright cosmic object 6,500 light-years away. In those days, before recovering physical tapes from the experiment, scientists first received scientific data on a strip chart recorder, a device that printed signals on paper. Astronomer Martin Weisskopf and his colleagues began their analysis on launch day by measuring the distance between signals using a ruler and pencil. ...
Decades later, Weisskopf proposed the development of an Earth-orbiting satellite with powerful instruments that could gather much more detailed measurements of the same kind about the Crab Nebula and other mysterious cosmic objects. That satellite became NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), which launched on December 9, 2021.
Now, more than 50 years after the sounding rocket experiment, scientists have used IXPE to create a detailed, nuanced map of the Crab Nebula’s magnetic field, revealing more of its inner workings than ever before. The new results ... help resolve longstanding mysteries about the well-studied Crab Nebula and open new questions for future study. ...
Simultaneous space and phase resolved X-ray polarimetry of the Crab pulsar and nebula ~ Niccolò Bucciantini et al
- Nature Astronomy (online 06 Apr 2023) DOI: 10.1038/s41550-023-01936-8
- arXiv > astro-ph > arXiv:2207.05573 > 12 Jul 2022 (v1), 30 Jul 2022 (v2)
- Nature Astronomy 6(12):1433 (Dec 2022) DOI: 10.1038/s41550-023-01936-8
- arXiv > astro-ph > arXiv:2206.07138 > 14 Jun 2022 (v1), 13 Jan 2023 (v3)