  Compact objects and supernova remnants provide nearby laboratories to probe
the fate of stars after they die, and the way they impact, and are impacted by,
their surrounding medium. The past five decades have significantly advanced our
understanding of these objects, and showed that they are most relevant to our
understanding of some of the most mysterious energetic events in the distant
Universe, including Fast Radio Bursts and Gravitational Wave sources. However,
many questions remain to be answered. These include: What powers the diversity
of explosive phenomena across the electromagnetic spectrum? What are the mass
and spin distributions of neutron stars and stellar mass black holes? How do
interacting compact binaries with white dwarfs - the electromagnetic
counterparts to gravitational wave LISA sources - form and behave? Which
objects inhabit the faint end of the X-ray luminosity function? How do
relativistic winds impact their surroundings? What do neutron star kicks reveal
about fundamental physics and supernova explosions? How do supernova remnant
shocks impact cosmic magnetism? This plethora of questions will be addressed
with AXIS - the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite - a NASA Probe Mission Concept
designed to be the premier high-angular resolution X-ray mission for the next
decade. AXIS, thanks to its combined (a) unprecedented imaging resolution over
its full field of view, (b) unprecedented sensitivity to faint objects due to
its large effective area and low background, and (c) rapid response capability,
will provide a giant leap in discovering and identifying populations of compact
objects (isolated and binaries), particularly in crowded regions such as
globular clusters and the Galactic Center, while addressing science questions
and priorities of the US Decadal Survey for Astronomy and Astrophysics
(Astro2020).
