Cassiopeia A was a star more than eight times the mass of our sun before it exploded in the cataclysmic, fiery death astronomers call a supernova.
And thanks to NASA space telescopes, scientists are learning more than ever about exactly how it happened. The new technology is cluing in scientists to a radioactive element fueling the universe’s biggest explosions.
The NuSTAR space telescope array is the first to map the radioactive material from a supernova explosion.
The supernova explosion’s light arrived on Earth about 350 years ago, but even today there’s still plenty of titanium-44 to be observed.
