Jun 22, 2026

Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers may have found a supernova remnant – seen in this June 11, 2026, image – in an intriguing neighborhood in the middle of the Milky Way galaxy. Supernova remnants are the expanding remains of exploded stars and provide elements like iron, oxygen, and silicon that are critical for the formation of planets and for life as we know it to form and flourish.

This new supernova remnant, if confirmed, would be one of the closest ever discovered to the supermassive black hole at the central region of our home galaxy, an exotic region crammed with massive stars, long threads of magnetic fields and dense clouds of gas orbiting rapidly around the Galactic Center.

Read more about this discovery.

Image credit: -ray: NASA/CXC/UCLA/Z. Zhu et al.; ESA/XMM-Newton; Optical: PanSTARRS; Radio: MeerKAT; Infrared (JWST): NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and P. Edmonds