Skeletal Hand-Like Structure Found Lurking in Deep Space
Move over, Pillars of Creation—there’s a new show in town and it’s called MSH 15-52. Catchy, we know.
Okay, really it’s not a new show—better to call it a revival. The eerie pulsar wind nebula spreads from the pulsar PSR B1509-58, first observed by the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2001. But now, a collaborative team has integrated observations from Chandra with new data from NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), providing novel insights into the nebula that eerily resembles a human hand. The researchers’ findings were published this week in The Astrophysical Journal.
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A noticeable feature in the ‘hand’ is a bright spot near its base, which streams towards the bottom-left side of the structure. This is an X-ray jet, and the bright spot indicates a region where many magnetic fields overlap and tangle. From this energetic hotspot, particles flow along magnetic field lines to other parts of the hand-shaped nebula.
“Shortly after Wilhelm Röntgen‘s discovery of X-rays on November 8, 1895, he created one of the most famous of all scientific images: an exposure of a colleague’s left hand, showing the bones with attendant rings,” Romani said in a guest blog on the Chandra website. “IXPE has thus followed Röntgen’s lead in imaging the magnetic field ‘bones’ of the cosmic hand.”
NASA releasing an image of an eerie, hand-like structure around Halloween is becoming routine. Last year, the space agency dropped a haunting Webb telescope image of the Pillars of Creation that made the region of the Eagle Nebula look like a zombie’s undead hand.
At the tips of MSH 15-52's purple, finger-like structures is a darker orange-brown cloud. This is the remnant of the supernova that created the pulsar. So in a way, the nebula’s cosmic hand is reaching back to where it started from.
More: AI Detected a Supernova All on Its Own
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