A supernova is the mysterious explosion in which a star is destroyed and now scientists are just beginning to unravel how that process comes about.

According to CBS News, NASA scientists are using the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) to gather data on the cosmic event. The satellite, which was launched in 2012, should help researchers understand the explosive cosmic event that produces the heavy matter that makes up the universe.

The NuSTAR satellite was designed to be sensitive to the kind of high energy X-rays normally found in supernovas. Known as Cassiopia A (Cas A), NuSTAR detected X-rays from the center of the star's explosion, giving scientists a direct look at the supernova. Scientists said the light from Cas A is believed to have reached Earth in 1671, but remnant images can be seen today from Earth stretching across 10 light years.

"Stars are spherical balls of gas, and so you might think that when they end their lives and explode, that explosion would look like a uniform ball expanding out with great power," study co-author Fiona Harrison, the principal investigator of NuSTAR at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, said in a news release. "Our new results show how the explosion's heart, or engine, is distorted, possibly because the inner regions literally slosh around before detonating."

Brian Grefenstette, of Caltech, was the lead author on the study published Thursday in the journal Nature. He said his team now has the evidence they need to properly investigate the supernova, since the X-rays are completely visible.

"With NuSTAR we have a new forensic tool to investigate the explosion," he said in the release. "Previously, it was hard to interpret what was going on in Cas A because the material that we could see only glows in X-rays when it's heated up. Now that we can see the radioactive material, which glows in X-rays no matter what, we are getting a more complete picture of what was going on at the core of the explosion."

NuSTAR could potentially challenge the theory that a star rotates rapidly before exploding. Although the team noticed jet imprints around Cas A, they could not definitively say it triggered the explosion.

Still, NASA's astrophysics division director Paul Hertz said this is what NuSTAR was launched to do.

"This is why we built NuSTAR," he said in the release. "To discover things we never knew - and did not expect - about the high-energy universe."