NASA shows an image that looks very similar to skeletal fingers floating in space

happy Halloween!

Ghost in hand

Astronomers have discovered what looks like a ghostly skeletal hand floating in outer space about 16,000 light-years from Earth.

An eerie image captured by NASA’s newest X-ray telescope, the X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), shows a pulsating wind nebula dubbed MSH 15-52 shedding mysterious finger-like protrusions of energetic particles, forming the distinctive shape of a ghostly hand.

Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars, extremely dense remnants of collapsed giant stars. They emit strong magnetic fields, causing them to release high-energy particles in jets, forming a pulsar wind nebula.

In the case of MSH 15-52, these jets formed the spitting image of a ghostly hand — a spooky apparition appropriate for Halloween.

“The charged particles that produce the New paper Published in Astrophysical Journalin statement.

Scary fingers

NASA’s IXPE focused its instruments on the nebula for 17 days, marking the longest observation of a single object since its launch in 2021, according to NASA.

“We are all familiar with X-rays as a diagnostic medical tool for humans,” Josephine Wong, co-author and Stanford physicist, said in the statement. “Here we use X-rays in a different way, but they again reveal information that was hidden from us.”

This observation sheds new light on how the mixed magnetic fields in pulsating wind nebulae interact with their surroundings, getting a large initial push around the ‘wrist’ of the hand, before being pushed into regions where these magnetic fields are more homogeneous.

“We have discovered the life history of ultra-energy matter and antimatter particles around the pulsar,” said co-author and Stanford postdoctoral research fellow Nicolo Di Lalla. “This teaches us how pulsars can act as particle accelerators.”

More about nebulae: James Webb observes several pairs of planets, hanging around without stars