NASA got excited about Halloween night and gave us a curious image that reveals the “bones” of a ghostly cosmic hand. Two space agency X-ray telescopes have combined their potential to capture a stellar explosion that, the final result shows, looks a lot like a skeleton’s hand.
A giant star in our galaxy ran out of nuclear fuel to burn about 1,500 years ago. When this happened, the star collapsed and formed an extremely dense object called a neutron star or pulsar. In other words, the catastrophic event It left behind “a superdense, rapidly spinning stellar corpse.”
NASA explained that young pulsars can create jets of matter and antimatter that move away from their poles. This, together with an intense wind, ends up creating a “pulsar wind nebula.” This is what, in short, we see in the images shared by the American space agency just in time for the Halloween celebration.
The pulsar is called PSR B1509-58 and was first seen in 2001 by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The hand-like nebula was named MSH 15-52 and is located 16,000 light years from our Earth. The pulsar is that which is right in the palm of this ghostly cosmic hand.
The technology behind the ghostly cosmic hand
The new images were made possible thanks to X-ray Polarimetry Imaging Explorer (IXPE, in its acronym in English), NASA’s newest X-ray telescope. The IXPE team observed MSH 15-52 for approximately 17 days, the longest analysis time of an object since its launch in December 2021.
“The IXPE data gives us the first map of the magnetic field in this hand,” said Roger Romani, of Stanford University in California and director of the study, in a release. “The charged particles that produce the X-rays travel along the magnetic field, determining the basic shape of the nebula, much like the bones in a person’s hand do.”
The space telescope showed that the amount of polarization is remarkably high in large regions of MSH 15-52. This suggests that there is little turbulence in these areas of the pulsar wind nebula, allowing the formation of straight, uniform magnetic field lines. It is what the fingers and thumb of this ghostly cosmic hand would be. Meanwhile, complex, turbulent regions give the particles an “energy boost,” which can be seen in the clear, bright stream of X-rays near the wrist.
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“We are all familiar with X-rays as a medical diagnostic tool for humans,” said co-author Josephine Wong, also of Stanford. “Here we use X-rays in a different way, but again they reveal information that would otherwise be hidden from us.”