Amazing images
The aftermath of two stellar explosions
3 January 2024
© NASA
NASA has started the new year with a self-proclaimed ‘double bang’ – that is, an image of supernova remnant 30 Doradus B. Why is it a double? In creating this image, a team of astronomers studying the remnant discovered that it could not have been formed by a single supernova. Instead the researchers believe it was created by at least two. 30 Doradus B is a region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way that sits some 160,000 light years away from us. It comprises dark clouds of gas, young stars, high-energy shocks and superheated gas. A team led by Wei-An Chen from National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan, used more than 2 million seconds of observing time from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory to study 30 Doradus B.