A zombie star’s spiky filaments shed light on a 12th century supernova

Some 6,500 light-years from Earth lurks a zombie star cloaked in long tendrils of hot sulfur.

Nobody knows how those tendrils formed. But astronomers now know where they’re going. New observations, reported in the Nov. 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters, capture the 3-D structure and motion of debris left in the wake of a supernova that was seen to detonate almost 900 years ago.

“It’s a piece of the puzzle towards understanding this very bizarre [supernova] remnant,” says astronomer Tim Cunningham of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.