Astronomers using NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) have captured a stunning image of a stellar structure known as the ‘Hand of God.’
This image shows a pulsar wind nebula known as the ‘Hand of God.’ Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / McGill.
This object is the 150-light-year-wide energized remains of a star that went supernova almost 19,000 years ago. It lies in the constellation of Circinus around 17,000 light-years away.
Near the bright white spot in this image is a very young and powerful pulsar called PSR B1509-58 (B1509 for short).
Discovered by the Einstein X-Ray Observatory in 1982, the pulsar is only 12 miles in diameter but packs a big punch: it is spinning 7 times every second and is releasing energy into its environment at a prodigious rate – presumably because it has an intense magnetic field at its surface, estimated to be 15 trillion times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field.
One of the big mysteries of the ‘Hand of God’ is whether the pulsar’s particles are interacting with the material in a specific way to make it look like a hand, or if the material is in fact shaped like a hand.
The image provides new clues to the puzzle. The object actually shrinks in the image, looking more like a fist, as indicated by the blue color. The northern region, where the fingers are located, shrinks more than the southern part, where a jet lies, implying the two areas are physically different.
The red cloud at the end of the finger region is a different structure, called RCW 89. The astronomers think the B1509’s wind is heating the cloud, causing it to glow with lower-energy X-ray light.
“We don’t know if the hand shape is an optical illusion. With NuSTAR, the hand looks more like a fist, which is giving us some clues,” said team member Dr Hongjun An of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
