NASA's Chandra Observatory Discovers Possible Supernova Remnant Near Milky Way's Central Black Hole

A team of astronomers led by Zhenlin Zhu and Mark Morris of UCLA has reported evidence for a new supernova remnant embedded within Sagittarius C, a bright radio-emitting bubble of ionized hydrogen gas near the Milky Way's galactic center. The candidate remnant appears as a concentrated blob of X-ray emission in data from Chandra and XMM-Newton, set within a larger cloud of expanding gas visible in MeerKAT radio data, as shown in composite multi-wavelength images combining X-ray, radio, optical, and infrared observations. If the identification is confirmed, the remnant would be expanding at roughly two million miles per hour and would be at least 1,700 years old. The researchers did not detect the expected elemental enhancements — such as iron, oxygen, or silicon — that a supernova blast typically scatters into surrounding space, though they suggest the debris may have already mixed with ambient gas. An alternative explanation — that the X-ray emission originates from a dense cluster of massive stars — was considered unlikely by the authors, as the blob is more than ten times brighter in X-rays than known stellar clusters of comparable size. Earlier observations by SOFIA had independently suggested an expanding gas shell at the same location, lending additional support to the supernova interpretation. The study's findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal.