A massive structure known as the Sun, which is more than 1,000 times the diameter of the Earth, has formed on the far side of the Milky Way Galaxy, an immense, globular cluster of stars that spans more than half the sky.
The structure is known as a supernova remnant.
It is estimated to have formed around 1.4 billion years ago in what is now the Carina Nebula, a spiral galaxy located about 100 million light-years away.
The supernova was too massive to have come from within the Milkyway, but it had been blown away by the violent destruction of its host star.
Now, researchers have uncovered the remnant in unprecedented detail by mapping out the exact location of the supernova explosion.
The researchers used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to image a patch of the sky in the Carinas Large Magellanic Cloud.
The image was taken in December 2015 and was made in the dark, making it easier for the astronomers to distinguish features such as star clusters, galaxies and nebulae.
The astronomers used a technique known as deep-sky counting to identify the location of each spot in the sky, then calculated the distance between the spots using the shape of the sun.
The astronomers then calculated how far away the supernovae would have been in the future.
They were able to confirm the location with data from the Very High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (VIRTEX) satellite, which can detect a burst of light that is emitted from a star or galaxy.
The data revealed that the superlaser was fired from about 200 million light years away.
That was within about 25 light years of the Sun.
This means the supermassive black hole that lies just beyond the star’s disk was located at about 1.7 million lightyears away, and the supervortices, the massive structures forming between stars, are at about 200 light years across.
The scientists calculated the superdense supernova’s impact would have left a huge crater in the interstellar medium, and it was estimated to be 10 times the size of Earth.
The supernova blast could have left an impact crater in interstellar space.
The findings, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, will be used to understand how stars and gas from the super-massive black holes in the centre of the galaxy formed.
The study is the result of an international collaboration between the University of Cambridge, the University Of Southampton and the University College London.
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