Astronomers have published photographs of colorful gas and dust strands left behind by a supernova found within the constellation Tucana, the toucan, located 200,000 light-years from Earth.

Credit: ESO/NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage team (STScI/AURA)/F. Vogt et al.

When astronomers peered into the constellation Tucana (the toucan), they found the small-but-powerful remnant of a stellar explosion hidden amid the colorful clouds of a nearby galaxy. The stellar remnant is the first of its kind found outside the Milky Way.

The strands of gas and dust left behind from a 2,000-year-old supernova shine in vibrant colors in new imagery created by space- and ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope, in Chile. Astronomers searched these clouds, located in a neighboring galaxy 200,000 light-years away, and found a well-hidden neutron star they'd suspected was inside.

The ESO, which operates the Very Large Telescope, released the dazzling images in a photo description on April 5. [In Photos: Amazing Views from the Very Large Telescope]

Frédéric Vogt, an ESO fellow, led a team of researchers to locate the hard-to-find stellar corpse that might explain "p1." Scientists have known about this source of X-ray waves for years but had yet to pinpoint its location.

Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage team (STScI/AURA)

The team studied the shapes of gas in a nearby dwarf galaxy known as the Small Magellanic Cloud, according to the ESO image description. The Small Magellanic Cloud's name comes from its smudge-like appearance in the southern skies. However, rather than a cloud, it's actually a collection of millions of stars.

Credit: Davide De Martin/ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2

A slowly expanding ring of gas inside the clouds of this system was an early clue to where the neutron star might be, researchers said in the image description.

Living stars create fusion and produce energy, and some stars are larger than others. But when death approaches, stars larger than 1.4 times the mass of the sun explode (leaving behind formations like rings) and can also collapse and leave behind an ultradense core known as a neutron star. In these cases, protons and electrons are put under tremendous gravitational pressure and form densely packed neutrons, hence the name.
 

Credit: ESO/NASA

Just like living stars, neutron stars can vary in strength. And the one hiding in these vibrant clouds was tricky to confirm because observations indicated it had a low magnetic-field strength. This means the neutron star radiates only at X-ray wavelengths and not at other detectable wavelengths along the electromagnetic spectrum. And while p1 initially appeared to emanate from the middle of the ring of gas that the team was studying, it was initially unclear if this neutron-star candidate was at the center of the ring or farther behind it. An instrument called MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) on the Very Large Telescope helped the team confirm what turned out to be an exciting finding.

The highly precise MUSE instrument spotted a cosmic coincidence: The ring perfectly circled p1. When the team discovered that the neutron star and p1 were one in the same, they compared their findings with the Chandra X-ray Observatory's existing X-ray data on this region f and confirmed their discovery.

"This is the first object of its kind to be confirmed beyond the Milky Way, made possible using MUSE as a guidance tool," Liz Bartlett, an ESO fellow and a co-author of a new study describing the findings, said in the image description. "We think that this could open up new channels of discovery and study for these elusive stellar remains."

The new work was detailed March 2 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Original article on Space.com.

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