Cosmic Hand (Image Source: Pinterest)
NASA has released a stunning new picture of a giant cosmic feature that looks like a cosmic hand sweeping through the universe. This "cosmic hand" is driven by one of the galaxy's most violent objects, pulsar B1509-58.
The picture is a wide combination of X-ray observations with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and radio observations from an Australian telescope array. After combining these two sets of data, astronomers made the most detailed picture yet of the pulsar and its surrounding nebula, MSH 15-52.
Despite stretching nearly 900 trillion miles wide, the nebula is powered by a small neutron star only 12 miles in diameter. The small but mighty object is the remnant core of an exploded star from way back when. Rotating almost seven times per second, the pulsar generates extremely intense magnetic fields about 15 trillion times more powerful than Earth's magnetic field. These fields fling streams of charged particles outward, sculpting the nearby debris into a hand-like shape.
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The initial photos of this object were taken in 2009, but current observations show many more details. Scientists can now observe thin filaments outlining the magnetic field of the nebula. In X-ray light, they can even identify features such as a jet close to the pulsar and bright inner "fingers."
While most remnants make a distinct shell around the explosion, RCW 89 looks patchy. Its X-ray, radio, and optical radiation are entangled, making a complicated and unconventional structure scientists are still trying to learn about.
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"Surprisingly, this object keeps on surprising us," Shumeng Zhang, the lead author of the research at the University of Hong Kong, stated. The study, published in The Astrophysical Journal, demonstrates the ways in which pulsars are the rapidly rotating cores of stars that have enough mass to explode.
Pulsars are some of the universe's most extreme objects ever. Despite their compact shape and size, they produce huge impacts on their environment and livelihood. Learning about these objects, such as B1509-58, enables researchers to learn about neutron stars and how they interact with space and warp nebulae.
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