Possible supernova remnant found near Milky Way central black hole
A star that exploded about 1,700 years ago may have left wreckage just a few dozen light-years from the black hole at our galaxy's center. NASA's Chandra and ESA's XMM-Newton caught the X-ray remains, still expanding near 2 million mph. If real, among the closest ever to Sagittar
A star that exploded roughly 1,700 years ago appears to have left its wreckage just a few dozen light-years from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton satellite, astronomers spotted a blob of X-ray emission buried inside a larger cloud of hot gas about 26,000 light-years from Earth. If it is a supernova remnant, it is still expanding at close to 2 million miles per hour. The team has not confirmed the find. The galactic center is one of the hardest places in the sky to study: it is packed with stars, gas, and dust, and the glare of countless overlapping X-ray sources tends to hide older remnants. That is why a candidate this close to the black hole stands out. Most known supernova remnants sit far from the crowded core, so an object this near Sagittarius A* gives researchers a rare look at how exploded stars evolve in the extreme environment shaped by the black hole's gravity. Confirmation will require more observing time to separate the faint signal from the background. For now it joins a short list of structures that may record violent stellar deaths in the most chaotic corner of our galaxy. Source: NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory, reported via Space.com and Phys.org.