An evidence of a lopsided supernova explosion has been found by NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. The star’s core exploded in one direction whereas the shell of the star blew up in the opposite direction when explosion took place.

These findings are of great significance as they have reached closer to revealing the reason behind crumbling of some supernovae into black holes and others into neutron stars.

In June 2012, NuSTAR, NASA’s Explorer-class mission, was launched. And it helps scientists study high energy X-rays. The mission’s main purpose was to collect information regarding the birth of elements when stars went off and understand the process during an explosion.

The star remnant, 1987A, is being examined within the study; it is 166,000 light-years away. In 1987, light from the explosion, which led to formation of the remnant, illuminated skies on top of Earth. On the other hand, different telescopes had found signs that this blast wasn’t spherical; the ‘smoking gun’ was found by NuSTAR within the variety of a radioscope called titanium-44.

According to Fiona Harrison, principal investigator of NuSTAR at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, “Titanium is made within the heart of the explosion; therefore it traces the form of the engine driving the activity of the star”. He added that by observing the movement of the energy of the X-rays returning from Titanium, the NuSTAR revealed that most of the fabric is moving off Earth.

Supernova 1987A was found to be the closed to the Earth; when light from its explosion hit Earth. Since 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has been studying SN1987A, which is a high-mass star lying in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy.