An image that's dubbed "The Hand of God" by Astronomers
 

http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/a966...-handofgod.jpg

'Hand of God' captured in NASA image

What looks like an X-ray of a hand is actually the remains of a star that exploded 17,000 light-years away.

The astronomers who captured this image with a NASA space telescope call it the "Hand of God."

"We don't know if the hand shape is an optical illusion," said Hongjun An of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in a statement from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) Mission.

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.

It's unclear whether the nebula looks like a hand because of the way the particles interact with the magnetic fields or if the particles are actually shaped like a hand.

NuSTAR says the star is about 12 miles in diameter and spins at nearly seven times a second. As the star spins, it spews particles "upheaved during the star's violent death."

The NuSTAR space telescope was launched in June 2012 with the goal of observing black holes, dead and exploded stars and "other extreme objects," according to NuSTAR.

Q

Cool beans, bro.

link it or it doesn't exist

Looks more like Milky Way farted.

There's currently a 74 page debate on the Falcons board over religion because of this photo. With that said, I'll just leave this thread with "ooooo cool! Astronomy rules!"

Beautiful, just imagine how life changing and mind expanding it would be to go into deep space and see something like that close up... you'd never be the same.

Dave Lane very soon 3....2.....1...

I'm just :Poke:ya. We talk about these pics all the time in science thread. You should visit more often.

Yeah, Dave Lane any second now, any second...

My son is going to school to get his doctorate in astrophysics. I asked him why and he said because its a big universe to discover. We know basically nothing about it. Should be fun to be a part of the discovery.

Thats awesome BRC, good for him... ya gotta be one smart cookie to delve into that.

I would imagine that there is an optimum distance for something like this. Bear this is mind:

"We don't know if the hand shape is an optical illusion," said Hongjun An of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in a statement from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) Mission.

That makes sense, I kinda just meant in general, like any of the pics we've seen from the Hubble, only from a few thousand, or even less, miles away.

It would be a literal explosion of awe inside the mind.

It would be WAY too massive to even know what the image resembles.