Massive stars end their lives by exploding like supernovae and releasing vast amounts of energy and matter. The stellar remnant is what remains of those stars , which can be a black hole or a neutron star, as in this case.
The image , captured by the XMM-Newton X-ray telescope of the European Space Agency (ESA), shows two neutron stars in very different stages : the largest in red and green tones, is Kesteven 79 , the remnant of a supernova explosion located about 23,000 light years distant from Earth with a young neutron star at its center (the blue spot); the second , the smallest and located in the lower part of the image, also colored blue, forms another neutron star with an extremely intense magnetic field , that is, a magnetar, discovered in 2013 by the scientific community.
According to experts, the discovery of this rare magnetar could have coincided with an X-ray explosion , probably triggered by a drastic change in the structure of the magnetar's magnetic field about a million years ago.
The image, in false color, has been formed thanks to the results of 15 observations made between 2004 and 2009 with the EPIC MOS camera of XMM-Newton and shows that the magnetar was formed long before the explosion that gave rise to Kesteven 79.
