Do you see that blue blob to the lower right of the image center?
Astronomers think that it shows where a massive star
exploded as a supernova whose light reached Earth
1,700 years ago.
The
image combines optical data from the
PanSTARRS telescopes in Hawaii (background stars in red, green, and blue), radio from the
MeerKAT telescope in South Africa (large red cloud) and X-rays from
NASA's
Chandra X-ray Observatory and
ESA’s
XMM-Newton (shown in blue).
The large cloud is a
star forming region called
Sagittarius C, which is /day/proximately 50
light-years in extent and about 26,000 light-years from
Earth.
It is located only about 260 light-years from the
supermassive black hole in the center of the Galaxy (off to the
left of the image).
If the
blue blob is confirmed to be a
supernova remnant, it would be one of the closest ever discovered to the
Galactic Center.
In this
dense region, the deaths of massive stars are connected to the birth of new stars through gas and magnetic fields in a complex way.