An image dubbed as the “Hand of God” generated by a telescope overseen by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has captured the imagination of astronomers and space explorers.
The captured image is actually a cloud of material ejected by an exploded star.
Reportedly, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) recently captured the image, showing a “pulsar wind nebula” derived from the death of a star.
The astronomers who captured this image with the NASA space telescope called it the “Hand of God because of its shape.
The NuSTAR has floated through vast frontier of outer space since 2012. Its mission is to see black holes, dead and exploded stars and other extreme objects, according to NASA website.
“What the image shows is a pulsar wind nebula, a dying star and the cloud of materials left over from the star after it exploded. The particles are interacting with nearby magnetic fields, causing the particles to glow in the image, according to NuSTAR,” USA Today reported.
There is a second red cloud close to the “fingertips” of the Hand of God which astronomers explained as the pulsar’s wind heating this cloud, causing it to glow.
The NASA website quoted Fiona Harrison, the mission’s principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif, “NuSTAR’s unique viewpoint, in seeing the highest-energy X-rays, is showing us well-studied objects and regions in a whole new light.”
However astronomers a still not clear whether the cloud of dust resembles a hand because of interaction of the particles with the magnetic fields or if the particles are actually shaped like a hand.
The discovery of the “Hand of God” has reportedly generated immense interest among astronomers and researchers studying black holes.
For some the discovery of the “Hand of God” is a hot topic in astronomy and would shed further light on how black holes grow and interact with each other different galaxies.
*Sources linked to within text.
Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/McGill