The rules: “Scientists are baffled” is one of those phrases reporters and headline writes love to overuse. In most cases, the scientists aren’t baffled, per se. In many cases, its just the opposite, but its a cheap shorthand to use when you want to get across the notion of a mystery. Bonus points if they use the phrase “Boffins Baffled!”

Dead ‘Hand of God’ star leaves astronomers baffled by its shape .

Really High Five

NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has showcased the telescope’s talent with an image showing the energized remains of a dead star, a structure nicknamed the “Hand of God” after its resemblance to a hand.

So, celestial objects looking like things is nothing new, like the famed “Pillars of Creation” in the Eagle Nebula, which always looked like something, erm, different…ahem…to me. The phenomena is called paredolia–the way your mind looks for familiar shapes in patterns, whether its a picture of a nebula or the pattern that appears on your toast. I guess its a handy (ha!) way of naming things.

In this case, however, it appears the “hand” is imparting some useful information:

The new “Hand of God” image shows a nebula 17,000 light-years away, powered by a dead, spinning star called PSR B1509-58, or B1509 for short.

The dead star, called a pulsar, is the leftover core of a star that exploded in a supernova.

The pulsar is only about 19 kilometers (12 miles) in diameter but packs a big punch: it is spinning around nearly seven times every second, spewing particles into material that was upheaved during the star’s violent death.

These particles are interacting with magnetic fields around the ejected material, causing it to glow with X-rays. The result is a cloud that looks like a hand.

One of the big mysteries of this object, called a pulsar wind nebula, is whether the pulsar’s particles are interacting with the material in a specific way to make it appear as a hand, or if the material is in fact shaped like a hand.

“We don’t know if the hand shape is an optical illusion,” Hongjun An of McGill University, Montreal, Canada, said.

“With NuSTAR, the hand looks more like a fist, which is giving us some clues,” An said.

Nice description. I’m going to say that this is Not Baffling.

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see also: