NASA has started the new year with a self-proclaimed "double bang" — that is, an image of supernova remnant 30 Doradus B, or 30 Dor B. Why is it a double? Well, in creating this image, a team of astronomers studying the remnant discovered that it could not have been formed by a single supernova. Instead, the researchers believe it was created by at least two.
30 Dor B is a region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way that sits some 160,000 light-years away from us. It comprises "dark clouds of gas, young stars, high-energy shocks, and superheated gas," per NASA. A team led by Wei-An Chen from the National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan, used more than two million seconds of observing time from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory to study 30 Dor B.
