Penn State astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to produce a new image of a ghostly exploded star with an unusual shape in a galaxy near the Milky Way. Astronomers think the object may be the remains of a white-dwarf star that disintegrated in a thermonuclear explosion, known as a Type Ia supernova, but it does not look like other likely Type Ia remnants found in our own Milky Way galaxy.
The research that led to the new image of this object was led by Penn State University astronomers Sangwook Park and Jae-Joon Lee, and was presented at the 214th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California, on 9 June 2009. The strange object, known as SNR 0104-72.3 (SNR 0104 for short), is in the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy, which is a neighbor of our Milky Way galaxy.
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