NASA’s NuSTAR Captures ‘Hand of God’ Made of Dead Star Debris

NASA has released breath-taking images of celestial objects that were captured by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) along with high energy X-rays, highlighting the telescope's capacity for identifying far and near cosmic objects.

The first cosmic image dubbed the 'Hand of God', which resembles a raised hand, is the energized remains of a dead star. The second image showcases distant black holes buried in layers of cosmic dust.

"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, Calif., said in a statement.

The 'Hand of God' image shows a pulsar wind nebula that is located 17,000 light years away. This is sourced by a dead spinning star (pulsar) called PSR B1509-58 or B1509, which  is the leftover core of a star that exploded in a supernova. With a 19-kilometre diameter, the pulsar spins seven times every second ejecting a wind of particles into the dead star material. These particles then interact with magnetic fields present around the ejected material making it glow with X-rays.

Scientists are wondering whether the pulsar particles interact with the material in a particular manner giving it the shape of a hand or whether the material itself looks like a hand.

"We don't know if the hand shape is an optical illusion," said Hongjun An of McGill University, Montreal, Canada. "With NuSTAR, the hand looks more like a fist, which is giving us some clues."

The second image displays a supermassive black hole that is 3-10 billion light years away in the COSMOS field. Every dot seen is in fact a different black hole in the galaxy. Red and green dots were captured by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and blue dots are black holes as identified by NuSTAR.

Launched on June 13, 2012, NuSTAR is on a mission to explore the high energy X-ray universe. It hunts for black holes, dead stars and other cosmic images that are present in our own galaxy and beyond.