Space & Astronomy

NASA telescope photographs 'Hand of God'

By T.K. Randall
January 13, 2014

Image: The Scale of the Universe
Credit: ESA/Hubble/D. Calzetti et al. / CC BY 4.0 (adapted) Originally photographed by the Chandra X-ray observatory in 2009, the "Hand of God" has been captured again by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuStar) in unprecedented detail.

Named after its similarity to Michelangelo's famous artwork on the Sistine Chapel, the image shows a pulsar wind nebula, an object powered by the extremely dense core of a star that blew up in a supernova explosion.The pulsar itself spins at an incredible rate, seven times per second, firing out a stream of particles that interact with the surrounding material.

"One of the big mysteries of this object is whether the pulsar 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," NASA wrote on its website.

Source: NASA

Tags: Nebula, NuStar