Fermi finds first known pair of sibling supernova remnants hidden by Jellyfish Nebula glare
Astronomers have identified what looks like the first known pair of sibling supernovae. Using 16 years of NASA Fermi data, a team found a second blast hidden in the glare of the Jellyfish Nebula. The two stars, each about 20 times the Sun's mass, once orbited each other before ex
Astronomers have turned up something never confirmed before: a pair of supernova remnants that appear to be siblings, the leftovers of two stars that were born together and died in the same corner of the galaxy. The discovery came from sixteen years of observations by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. A team led by researcher Miltiadis Michailidis detected gamma-ray emission from a remnant cataloged as G189.6+3.3, which had been effectively invisible because it sits right next to the much brighter Jellyfish Nebula, known to astronomers as IC 443. The glare of the well-studied nebula had masked its quieter neighbor for decades. What ties the two together is their shared history. The researchers propose that the stars once orbited each other as a binary, each roughly 20 times the mass of the Sun. When the first star exploded, the blast kicked its companion away, sending it drifting through space. Thousands of years later, somewhere between 20,000 and 110,000 by the team's estimate, the second star reached the end of its life and detonated too. The two remnants now lie about 6,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Gemini, their explosion centers separated by roughly 40 light-years and linked by a bright filament of gas. Finding a matched pair like this is useful beyond the novelty. Most supernova remnants are studied in isolation, so a confirmed sibling system gives researchers a rare chance to compare two explosions that started from similar stars and unfolded in the same region, which can sharpen models of how massive stars live and die.