Scientists have found fragments of titanium blasting out of a famous supernova. This discovery, made with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, could be a major step in pinpointing exactly how some giant stars explode.
This work is based on Chandra observations of the remains of a supernova called Cassiopeia A, located in our galaxy about 11,000 light-years from Earth. This is one of the youngest known supernova remnants, with an age of about 350 years.
Image Credit: NASA/CXC/RIKEN/T. Sato et al.; NuSTAR: NASA/NuSTAR)