Chandra Release - September 18, 2006

Visual Description: RCW 86

The X-ray image of the supernova remnant RCW 86 shows a large, bright, irregular circular object that resembles an outlined glowing ball. At the edges of the remnant, there are wispy, bright tendrils around the perimeter. On the right side is a close-up of just a small portion of the remnant from the upper left.  The colors are a pretty combination of aqua green and burnt orange.  The combined image of X-ray observations from the Chandra and XMM-Newton of RCW 86 shows the expanding ring of debris that was created after a massive star in the Milky Way collapsed onto itself and exploded. Both the Chandra and XMM-Newton images have low energy X-rays colored in red, medium energies in green and high energies in blue. The Chandra observations focused on the northeast (left-hand) side of RCW 86 show that X-ray radiation is produced both by high-energy electrons accelerated in a magnetic field (blue) as well as heat from the blast itself (red).