NASA Telescopes Spot Bones of 'Ghostly' Cosmic Hand

NASA's X-ray space telescopes have revealed the "bones" of an enormous cosmic hand. This marks the second "ghostly" apparition to be spotted by NASA this Halloween week.

Of course, the structure isn't actually a hand, but it represents something just as otherworldly: the magnetic field lines of a dead star, 16,000 light-years away from Earth.

Around 1,500 years ago, a giant star ran out of fuel and collapsed in on itself, crushing all of its protons and electrons together to form a super-dense neutron star.

Neutron stars are the densest objects that astronomers can observe directly, squashing the mass of an entire sun into the size of Manhattan, according to NASA. As these dense objects rotate, they may emit powerful pulses of radiation at regular intervals, producing strong magnetic fields. Neutron stars that do this are known as pulsars.

Pulsars can also throw out large jets of particles into outer space, which are funneled along the star's magnetic field lines, producing what is known as a pulsar wind nebula.

In 2001, researchers at NASA's Chanda X-ray Observatory first observed a named pulsar known as PSR B1509-58 and revealed that its pulsar nebula wind resembled the ghostly shape of a skeletal human hand. Now, the space agency's newest X-ray telescope, the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) has been observing the pulsar's wind nebula for over 17 days, the longest it has ever looked at a single object since its launch in December 2021.

"The IXPE data gives us the first map of the magnetic field in the 'hand'," Roger Romani, a Physics Professor at Stanford University in California who led the study, said in a statement to NASA. "The charged particles producing the X-rays travel along the magnetic field, determining the basic shape of the nebula, like the bones do in a person's hand."

These X-ray images, which NASA described as "ghostly," can be used to study the movement of particles within this system to learn more about how objects like this are able to form.

The image comes just days after NASA released images from its Juno mission's 54^th close flyby of Jupiter, showing the planet's clouds contorted into a spooky, ghoulish face.

The phenomenon of seeing human faces and limbs in everyday objects is called pareidolia and it stems from our innate ability to look for patterns in the world around us. So while PSR B1509-58's wind nebula is just a random smear of particles in outer space, our brains are programmed to interpret it as a haunting, Coraline-esque hand stretching out into the night sky.