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The star that formed the Jellyfish nebula may have had a partner star that exploded 100,000 years earlier, according to international researchers, who say that this may be the first known discovery of a binary star system in which both stars have gone supernova.
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The Jellyfish nebula, known as IC 443, is the remnant of a star exploding in a supernova and leaving behind an expanding cloud of debris. IC 443 is located in the Gemini constellation, approximately 6,000 light-years from Earth, and researchers have now discovered that it occupies the same physical environment as another supernova remnant called G189.6+3.3. The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.
Supernova remnants are expanding clouds of debris left behind after supernovae (stellar explosions). While hundreds of such remnants are known in our galaxy, identifying relationships between them is difficult, particularly in crowded regions of the Milky Way. IC 443, a remnant in the constellation Gemini approximately 6,000 light-years from Earth, sits close to other astronomical structures and within a complex cloud of gas and dust, making its surrounding region difficult to study.
Miltiadis Michailidis and colleagues combined 16 years of Fermi Large Area Telescope gamma-ray observations with eROSITA X-ray and complementary multiwavelength data. Using these data, the authors established that the recently discovered supernova remnant G189.6+3.3 occupies the same physical environment as IC 443, indicating that the two exist in close proximity and at approximately the same distance from Earth.
The age estimates suggest that the parent star of G189.6+3.3 exploded between approximately 20–100,000 years before the explosion that created IC 443. Validation of these measurements using statistical analysis and simulations suggests that this configuration is highly unlikely to be a chance alignment, indicating that the two stars that preceded these remnants were born together in a binary system. This discovery has the potential to provide new insights into supernovae and binary star systems.
More information: Miltiadis Michailidis et al, Shared cloud interactions unveil a candidate binary-system supernova pair with no known analogue, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-74978-x
Provided by W.W.Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory
This story was originally published on Phys.org.
