The Briefing Room

General Category => Science, Technology and Knowledge => Topic started by: happyg on January 10, 2014, 07:24:52 pm

Title: 'Hand of God' Spotted by NASA Space Telescope (Photo)
Post by: happyg on January 10, 2014, 07:24:52 pm
By Tanya Lewis

(http://i.space.com/images/i/000/035/841/i02/nustar-hand-of-god.jpg?1389296686)

The hand might look like an X-ray from the doctor's office, but it is actually a cloud of material ejected from a star that exploded. NASA's NuSTAR spacecraft has imaged the structure in high-energy X-rays for the first time, shown in blue. Lower-energy X-ray light previously detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is shown in green and red. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/McGill View full size image Religion and astronomy may not overlap often, but a new NASA X-ray image captures a celestial object that resembles the "Hand of God." The cosmic "hand of God" photo was produced when a star exploded and ejected an enormous cloud of material, which NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, glimpsed in high-energy X-rays, shown in blue in the photo. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory had imaged the green and red parts previously, using lower-energy X-rays. "NuSTAR's unique viewpoint, in seeing the highest-energy X-rays, is showing us well-studied objects and regions in a whole new light," NuSTAR telescope principal investigator Fiona Harrison, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement. The new image depicts a pulsar wind nebula, produced by the -

 See more at: http://www.space.com/24225-hand-of-god-photo-nasa-telescope.html#sthash.3WS3qNQJ.4AWqtVRX.dpuf