NASA’s Chandra Discovers Possible Supernova Remnant in Galactic Center

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. Astronomers may have uncovered a new supernova remnant in a star-forming region near the center of the Milky Way galaxy using data from Chandra and XMM-Newton. If confirmed, this would be one of the closest supernova remnants to the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center. This image shows the region where the evidence was found, which contains X-rays from Chandra and XMM-Newton, radio data from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa, and an optical image from the Pan-STARRS telescopes in Hawaii. X-ray: NASA/CXC/UCLA/Z. Zhu et al.; ESA/XMM-Newton; Optical: PanSTARRS; Radio: MeerKAT; Infrared (JWST): NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and P. Edmonds 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