Giant ghostly 'hand' stretches through space in new X-ray views
The "hand" was spawned by the death of a massive star in a supernova explosion, which left behind a fast-spinning, superdense stellar corpse known as a pulsar, Chandra team members said in a description of the dramatic images.
That pulsar has blown a bubble of energetic particles around itself, which, combined with the debris blasted out by the supernova explosion, created the hand-like structure that stretches 150 light-years. The glowing feature that it's reaching for, meanwhile, is a mammoth gas cloud known as RCW 89.
The supernova remnant at the heart of the hand, called MSH 15-52, lies about 17,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers think the light from its explosion reached us about 1,700 years ago, making MSH 15-52 one of the youngest supernova remnants known in our Milky Way galaxy, Chandra team members said.
Chandra has imaged the hand before; it was the subject of an April 2009 photo release, for example. But a recent study took a deep dive into the hand's dynamics, using Chandra imagery from 2004, 2008, 2017 and 2018.
