DescriptionIsolated Neutron Star RX J185635-3754 - opo9732a.jpg
English: This is the first direct look, in visible light, at a lone neutronstar, as seen by NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble results show thestar is very hot (1.2 million degrees Fahrenheit or about 670 thousand degrees Celsius at the surface), and can be no larger than 16.8 miles (28 kilometers) across. These resultsprove that the object must be a neutron star, because no other knowntype of object can be this hot, small, and dim (below 25th magnitude). The first clue that there was a neutron star at this location came in1992, when the ROSAT (the Roentgen Satellite) found a bright X-ray source without any optical counterpart in optical sky surveys. Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 was used in October 1996 to undertake asensitive search for the optical object, and found a stellar pinpointof light within only 2 arc seconds (1/900th the diameter of the Moon) ofthe X-ray position. Astronomers haven't directly measured the neutronstar's distance, but fortunately the neutron star lies in front of amolecular cloud known to be about 400 light-years away in the southernconstellation Corona Australis.
Fred Walter (State University of New York at Stony Brook) and NASA/ESA
Licensing
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse
This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if ESA material created after 2008 or source material from other organizations is in use. The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute under Contract NAS5-26555, or for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or 2008 copyright statement at spacetelescope.org. For material created by the European Space Agency on the spacetelescope.org site since 2009, use the {{ESA-Hubble}} tag.
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Image title
This is the first direct look, in visible light, at a lone neutronstar, as seen by NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble results show thestar is very hot (1.2 million degrees Fahrenheit or about 670 thousand degrees Celsius at the surface), and can be no larger than 16.8 miles (28 kilometers) across. These resultsprove that the object must be a neutron star, because no other knowntype of object can be this hot, small, and dim (below 25th magnitude). The first clue that there was a neutron star at this location came in1992, when the ROSAT (the Roentgen Satellite) found a bright X-ray source without any optical counterpart in optical sky surveys. Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 was used in October 1996 to undertake asensitive search for the optical object, and found a stellar pinpointof light within only 2 arc seconds (1/900th the diameter of the Moon) ofthe X-ray position. Astronomers haven't directly measured the neutronstar's distance, but fortunately the neutron star lies in front of amolecular cloud known to be about 400 light-years away in the southernconstellation Corona Australis.
Source
ESA/Hubble
Credit/Provider
Fred Walter (State University of New York at Stony Brook) and NASA/ESA
Short title
Hubble Sees a Neutron Star Alone in Space
Usage terms
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License