
Ancient observers saw the brightest supernova ever recorded on Earth one thousand years ago, now seen in a combined image by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and three other telescopes.
The supernova originated from a white dwarf star that fed on mass from a companion star, and eventually grew unstable and exploded. Heavy elements such as iron within the star were freed by the explosion and flung out into the interstellar void.
The blue in this image represents X-ray data from Chandra, yellow indicates optical data from the Curtis Schmidt telescope, orange and light blue show more optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey, and red signals radio data from the Very Large Array and Green Bank Telescope.
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