NASA X-ray spacecraft discovers supernova wreckage at the heart of the Milky Way

NASA’s Chandra X-ray spacecraft has detected the supernova wreckage of a dead star near the supermassive black hole that sits at the heart of the Milky Way, around 26,000 light-years from Earth.

The team behind the discovery believes the star that died to create this wreckage erupted around 1,700 years ago. This represents the closest supernova debris found to our central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*).

The supernova wreckage sits within a bubble of ionized hydrogen gas, which is a bright source of radio waves, and has been dubbed Sagittarius C (Sgr C). The wreckage was detected by Chandra and the XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope as a “blob” of X-rays. The shell of ejected material appears to be moving at a staggering 2 million miles per hour (3.2 million kilometers per hour).

Supernova wreckage like this is important for the chemical enrichment of galaxies, including the next generation of stars and planets.

That’s because when massive stars like the progenitor star of this debris explode, the heavy elements they have forged from hydrogen and helium are jettisoned into their surroundings.

Eventually, these elements mix with surrounding clouds of interstellar gas and dust. Later, cool and dense regions in these molecular clouds collapse under their own gravity, forming new stars. The envelopes of material around these infant stars eventually form clumps that gather more and more mass to become planets.

There is still some ambiguity surrounding this wreckage, however. The team behind the observation didn’t find increased amounts of the elements that would have been blasted out by the exploding star.