An X-ray telescope has captured the ‘Hand of God’ in space.
NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuStar, captured the new image of a dead star nicknamed the ‘Hand of God’ since it looks like an open hand.
NuStar has been circling earth since June 2012, on a mission to gather more information about black holes in our universe.
‘NuStar’s unique viewpoint, in seeing the highest-energy X-rays, is showing us well-studied objects and regions in a whole new light,’ Fiona Harrison, the mission’s principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California said on the university’s website.
This latest image is helping astronomers learn more about pulsars, which are the remnants of dead stars.
The ‘Hand of God’ is a pulsar 17,000 light-years away. It’s only about 12 miles in diameter but spins around about seven times in a second throwing around particles from the dead star.
Previous images captured of the pulsar made it look like an outstretched hand (shown in red and blue in the picture), but this new image makes it look more like a fist (shown in blue).
‘We don’t know if the hand shape is an optical illusion,’ said Hongjun An of McGill University. ‘With NuStar, the hand looks more like a fist which is giving us some clues.’
This new picture leads astronomers to believe that the fingers captured in the original picture are physically different areas from the fist.
Source: Daily Mail
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