William Atkins
Tuesday, 07 April 2009 20:15
Science -
Space
Page 1 of 2
An interesting image taken by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows a hand-shaped nebula coming out of a young, tiny but powerfully rotating pulsar called PSR B1509-58, or B1509 for short.
The very unusual image is found at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics website “
PSR B1509-58: A Young Pulsar Shows its Hand.”
The dense pulsar is only about 12 miles (19 kilometers) in diameter, but has produced this hand-shaped nebula, made from x-ray radiation (light), which is about 150 light-years in length.
B1509 is also only about 1,700 years old and located about 17,000 light-years from Earth.
A pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star that has resulted from the death of a super-massive star by a fierce explosion called a supernova.
It is rotating once in about 7 seconds, a very fast spinning pulsar.
The supernova remnant (SNR), the burnt out star, is called MSH 15-52 (G 320.4-01.2). [ArXiv: “
Chandra observations of PSR B1509-58 and Supernova Remnant G320.4-1.2”; and Astronomy & Astrophysics: “
On the age of PSR B 1509-58”]
Because of its rapid rotation about its axis, it is spewing out a lot of energy into space. Some of this energy has been loosely formed into a
“cosmic hand” of sorts.
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