https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mapping-the-remains-of-supernovae/

When a dense stellar core called a white dwarf acquires enough material from a companion star orbiting nearby, it burns up in the nuclear fusion blast of a Type Ia supernova. This ejects freshly synthesized elements that mix with interstellar gas and eventually form stars and galaxies. But astrophysicists still don't know the specific conditions that ignite these explosions.

Ivo Seitenzahl, an astrophysicist at University of New South Wales Canberra, and his colleagues used the upgraded Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to build unprecedented 3-D chemical maps of the debris left behind by these supernovae. These maps can help scientists work backward to “constrain the fundamental properties of these explosions, including the amount of kinetic energy and the mass of the exploding star,” says Carles Badenes, an astrophysicist at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study.