// NASA BREAKING NEWS — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
NASA’s Chandra Discovers Possible Supernova Remnant in Galactic Center
Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers may have found a supernova remnant in an intriguing neighborhood in the middle of our galaxy. A paper describing these new findings published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Supernova remnants are the expanding remains of exploded stars and provide elements – like iron, oxygen, and silicon – that are critical for the formation of planets and for life as we know it to form and flourish.
This new supernova remnant, if confirmed, would be one of the closest ever discovered to the supermassive black hole at the central region of the Milky Way galaxy, an exotic region crammed with massive stars, long threads of magnetic fields and dense clouds of gas orbiting rapidly around the Galactic Center.
A new composite image of this region contains X-rays from Chandra and ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) XMM-Newton mission (shown in blue) as well as radio data from the MeerKAT telescope (shown in red) in South Africa. These have been combined with an optical image from the Pan-STARRS telescopes in Hawaii (red, green, and blue). The plane of the galaxy runs horizontally from left to right in the image, and the central black hole is off to the left of the image.
The evidence for the new supernova remnant, located about 26,000 light-years from Earth, comes from X-ray data from Chandra and XMM-Newton. The X-ray data reveals a “blob” of X-ray emission that may come from the remains of a massive star that self-destructed as a supernova, buried within the larger cloud of expanding gas.
The location of this suspected supernova remnant in the image is labeled with a circle.
It is in a bubble of gas that has had electrons stripped away from hydrogen – called an “H II region” – surrounding a massive, young star. This bubble is a bright source of radio emission called Sagittarius C.
If this is indeed a supernova remnant, then it is expanding at about two million miles per hour and is at least about 1,700 years old. Previously, observations with NASA’s now-retired SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) mission had shown evidence for an expanding shell of gas surrounding Sagittarius C. This gave astronomers a hint that a stellar explosion had occurred in the same spot.
The long filaments seen in the radio image are caused by energetic particles travelling along magnetic fields that are mostly directed perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy.
The nuclear fusion engines of stars create elements from hydrogen and helium that were abundant at the beginning of the universe. When stars explode at the end of their lives as supernovae, they send these newly synthesized elements into interstellar space and provide material for the next generation of stars and planets.