XMM-Newton

"Having these two methods agree lets us breathe a sigh of relief," said Carlos Badenes of Princeton University who led the Chandra and XMM-Newton study. "It looks like we're on the right track with trying to understand these big explosions. Their stellar debris really can retain a memory of what created them hundreds of years earlier."

Both methods estimated a similar time since the explosion of about 400 years. An extra constraint on the age comes from the lack of recorded historical evidence for a recent supernova in the LMC. Because this star appears in the southern hemisphere, it likely would have been seen by navigators who noted similarly bright celestial events if it had occurred less than about 400 years ago.

Because Type Ia supernovas have nearly uniform intrinsic brightness, they are used as important tools by scientists to study the expansion of the universe and the nature of dark energy.

"It's crucial to know that the basic assumptions about these explosions are correct, so they're not used just as black-boxes to measure distances," said Badenes.

This work is also being extended to other supernova remnants and light echoes.

"This is the first case where the conclusions that are drawn from the supernova remnant about the original explosion can be directly tested by looking at the original event itself," said Rest. "We'll be able to learn a lot about supernovas in our own galaxy by using this technique."

Notes for editors:

These results appear in two papers recently accepted in The Astrophysical Journal. The first discusses the spectrum obtained by Gemini, led by Rest. The second, with Badenes as first author, details the Chandra and XMM observations of SNR 0509-67.5.

XMM-Newton, ESA’s space-borne X-ray observatory is the biggest scientific satellite ever built in Europe. Its telescope mirrors are the most sensitive ever developed in the world, and with its sensitive detectors, it sees much more than any previous X-ray satellite.

XMM-Newton science operations are handled at ESA’s European Space and Astronomy Centre (ESAC). The satellite was designed and built to return data for at least a decade. It has detected more X-ray sources than any previous satellite and is helping solve many cosmic mysteries of the violent Universe, from what happens in and around black holes to the formation of galaxies in the early Universe. The satellite uses over 170 wafer-thin cylindrical mirrors spread over three telescopes.

Its orbit takes it almost a third of the way to the Moon, so that astronomers can enjoy long, uninterrupted views of celestial objects. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Alabama, USA manages the Chandra program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Massachusetts, USA.