The pulsar PSR B1509-58 is somewhere in there (Image found on Discovery.com)
Thanks to pareidolia, it's very easy to see a glowing hand in the image above, but the ghostly palm and fingers reaching out into the cosmos are actually the blown-apart remains of a dead star, zapped by powerful energy beams shooting out from its spinning corpse. Who said astronomy couldn't be creepy, huh?
The image is a composite made from observations by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), showing the appropriately-named “Hand of God” nebula located 17,000 light-years away.
And somewhere within that bright area is the pulsar PSR B1509-58, a super-dense, rapidly spinning neutron star barely 12 miles wide — but blasting huge amounts of high-energy radiation into the 150-light-year-wide cloud of material it blew off nearly 2,000 years ago. As the pulsar’s emissions interact with the surrounding, expanding material, it glows in X-rays that orbiting observatories can see.
Scientists still don't know if the hand shape is just an illusion or not. Oh, and the bubbling orange cloud the hand seems to be reaching for is the nearby gas cloud RCW 89, which is also being energized by beams from the pulsar, as well as the faster wind within the “fingers.”
The image is a composite made from observations by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), showing the appropriately-named “Hand of God” nebula located 17,000 light-years away.
And somewhere within that bright area is the pulsar PSR B1509-58, a super-dense, rapidly spinning neutron star barely 12 miles wide — but blasting huge amounts of high-energy radiation into the 150-light-year-wide cloud of material it blew off nearly 2,000 years ago. As the pulsar’s emissions interact with the surrounding, expanding material, it glows in X-rays that orbiting observatories can see.
Scientists still don't know if the hand shape is just an illusion or not. Oh, and the bubbling orange cloud the hand seems to be reaching for is the nearby gas cloud RCW 89, which is also being energized by beams from the pulsar, as well as the faster wind within the “fingers.”
~Ally
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