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Jun 24, 2026

Scientists discover remnants of Jellyfish Nebula’s ‘sibling’ supernova

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Millions of years ago two massive stars circled each other in a cosmic dance. Then one of the stars went supernova. The blast likely flung the exploded star’s companion across space, setting it adrift in the cosmos for tens of thousands of years before it, too, succumbed to the same explosive end.

That, at least, is what astronomers believe may have happened to a newly identified pair of stellar remnants. Using observations from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, researchers suggest that two clouds of supernova debris were once part of a binary star system—a pair of stars bound together by gravity and orbiting a common center.

“There are so many striking connections between the two remnants,” said Miltiadis Michailidis, a postdoctoral fellow at the physics department at Stanford University, in a statement. “They’re likely related, giving us the first known example of a binary system where both stars have undergone supernova explosions.”


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When a star explodes, it expels powerful shock waves that can accelerate charged particles to near-light speeds, creating cosmic rays. As these cosmic rays slam into nearby clouds of gas, they produce gamma rays—the highest-energy form of light. By detecting these gamma rays, astronomers can trace the lingering remnants of ancient supernovae long after the original stars have vanished.

On a mottled reddish background speckled with stars, yellow threads of gas at center right trace out a dome-shaped structure from which curving tendrils extend toward the lower right. Blue and red filaments trace a ring around the dome’s base. A violet arc stretches right to left just above the center of the image, and irregular orange gas clouds become thicker toward the upper left.

This multiwavelength scene shows the Jellyfish Nebula supernova remnant (right), the interstellar cloud it’s interacting with and a distinctive curving filament to its upper left.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/M. Michailidis et al. 2026; DSS (optical); NASA/WISE/JPL-Caltech/UCLA (infrared); NASA/Swift (ultraviolet)

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