Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2018

14 MAY-JUNE 2018 SPACE CHRONICLES Chile, to track down the first ever isolated neutron star with low mag- netic field located beyond our own Milky Way galaxy. The team noticed that the ring was centred on an X- ray source that had been noted years before and designated p1. The nature of this source had re- mained a mystery. In particular, it was not clear whether p1 actually lies inside the remnant or behind it. It was only when the ring of gas — which includes both neon and oxy- gen — was observed with MUSE that the science team noticed it per- fectly circled p1. The coincidence was too great, and they realised that p1 must lie within the super- nova remnant itself. Once p1’s loca- MUSE data points to isolated neutron star beyond our galaxy by ESO S pectacular new pictures, cre- ated from images from both ground- and space-based tele- scopes, tell the story of the hunt for an elusive missing object hidden amid a complex tangle of gaseous filaments in the Small Magellanic Cloud, about 200,000 light-years from Earth. New data from the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile has re- vealed a remarkable ring of gas in a system called 1E 0102.2-7219, ex- panding slowly within the depths of numerous other fast-moving fila- ments of gas and dust left behind after a supernova explosion. This discovery allowed a team led by Frédéric Vogt, an ESO Fellow in