NASA telescope photographs 'bones' of ghostly hand floating out in deep space

A team of astronomers has used data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to detect a ghostly skeleton hand floating in deep space located more than 15,000 light years away from Earth.

NASA's latest and greatest X-ray telescope has used its Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) to observe MSH 15-52 for a total of 17 days, the longest Chandra has observed a single object since it launched in December 2021. So, what is the ghostly hand? The astronomers explain that MSH 15-52 is the leftover remains of a dead collapsed star. When a star exhausts its fuel, it collapses in on itself creating an extremely dense object called a neutron star.

A pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star, and technically, MSH 15-52 is a pulsar wind nebula that emits a very strong magnetic field that produces powerful jet streams of energized particles. The researchers recently penned a study published in the Astrophysical Journal where they explain the magnetic field created by the pulsar determines the basic shape of the nebula and, in the case of MSH 15-52, the bones of the ghostly hand.

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"The charged particles producing the X-rays travel along the magnetic field, determining the basic shape of the nebula, like the bones do in a person's hand," said Stanford University's Roger Romani, lead author of a new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.

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"We're all familiar with X-rays as a diagnostic medical tool for humans," said co-author and Stanford physics PhD Josephine Wong in the statement. "Here we're using X-rays in a different way, but they are again revealing information that is otherwise hidden from us."

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"We've uncovered the life history of super energetic matter and antimatter particles around the pulsar," said co-author and Stanford postdoctoral research fellow Niccolò Di Lalla. "This teaches us about how pulsars can act as particle accelerators."