See! This amazing light art is actually a sky filled with X-rays

An instrument aboard International Space Station Painted the night skies with X-ray observations of the universe that surrounds us – and produces an amazing image.

The NASA device, called the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, arrived at the space station in June 2017. His job is to perform incredibly accurate measurements of the size of neutron stars, with super-corpses having exploded. The new image is based on data collected during its first 22 months of work.

"Even with minimal processing, this image reveals the Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant of about 90 light-years that would be between 5,000 and 8,000 years old," said Keith Gendreau, principal investigator of the Goddard mission. Space Flight Center of NASA, Maryland, said in a statement.

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This feature is the bright spot that stands out against the darker background towards the upper left corner of the image. Most other X-ray sources that stand out in the image are pulsars, which are a type of neutron star that produce X-ray jets when they spin.

As the space station turns around the Earth and spends from day to night, NICER switches to point to different specific targets, like these pulsars. The arcuate lines on the image represent these oscillations, with lighter lines indicating the paths that the instrument follows most often in its investigations. The particular points of the map also appear brighter if NICER has spent more time looking in that direction.

The longer the instrument goes to work, the more scientists will be able to fill this card – and this could reveal new pulsars for NICER to study what researchers do not yet know how to orient towards the instrument.

"We are gradually building a new x-ray image of the entire sky, and it is possible that NICER's nighttime scans uncover previously unknown sources," said Gendreau.

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