The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has unveiled stunning pictures of “Hand of God” stretching across 150 light-years of space that is created by one of the galaxy’s most powerful electromagnetic generators.
The combined data came from Australia’s telescope array and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, demonstrating the impressive look at the pulsar B1509-58, nicknamed cosmic hand, and nebulae it generates and surrounds.
The “cosmic hand” measures almost 900 trillion miles across space which is 75 times the size of the solar system.
The stunning cosmic display also hosts a neutron star just 12 miles across and spins nearly 7 times per second.
A pulsar is a dense neutron star. It forms as the result of the explosion of a massive star in a supernova. Nebula is a giant cloud of dust and gas in space.
The magnetic field of pulsar is much stronger than Earth and estimated at 15 trillion times powerful enough to divert the stream of charged particles outward and turn them into hand-like structures known as MSH 15-52.
This is not the first-of-its-kind picture of a cosmic hand. NASA first captured the image in 2009.
But the new image reveals new and distinguished features.
NASA shed light on RCW 89 which is also the collapsed core of supernova.
In the snap, RCW 89 looks patchy with X-ray, radio and optical emissions interwoven with each other.
Shumeng Zhang from the University of Hong Kong said, “This object continues to surprise us. By combining different types of light, we’re uncovering new details about how pulsars and supernova remnants interact.”