This Week’s WITU Challenge


Here’s this week’s image for the WITU Challenge, to test your visual knowledge of the cosmos. You know what to do: take a look at this image and see if you can determine where in the universe this image is from; give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. We’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is — give everyone the chance to guess.

UPDATE: The answer has been posted below.

This object is the remains of a Type Ia supernova caused by the thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf. It is called SNR 0104-72.3 (SNR 0104 for short), and is in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a small neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way. The image was taken by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The asymmetrical shape of this object is unusual for such a supernova and astronomers think this might be caused by jets in the explosion or clumps of nearby gas.

Find out more about SNR 0104 at the Chandra website.

Check back next week for another WITU challenge!

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/

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Nancy Atkinson

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