Can
you see the shape of a hand in this new X-ray image? 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. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/McGill. Full image and caption
A
range of supermassive black holes lights up this new image from NASA's
Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. All of the dots are
active black holes tucked inside the hearts of galaxies, with colors
representing different energies of X-ray light. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Yale University. Full image and caption
Two
new views from NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR,
showcase the telescope's talent for spying objects near and far. One
image shows the energized remains of a dead star, a structure nicknamed
the "Hand of God" after its resemblance to a hand. Another image shows
distant black holes buried in blankets of dust.
"NuSTAR's unique viewpoint, in seeing the highest-energy X-rays, is
showing us well-studied objects and regions in a whole new light," said
Fiona Harrison, the mission's principal investigator at the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.
NuSTAR launched into space June 13, 2012, on a mission to explore the
high-energy X-ray universe. It is observing black holes, dead and
exploded stars and other extreme objects in our own Milky Way galaxy and
beyond.
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, in previous images,
looked like an open 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," said
Hongjun An of McGill University, Montreal, Canada. "With NuSTAR, the
hand looks more like a fist, which is giving us some clues."
The second image from NuSTAR shows active, supermassive black holes
between three and 10 billion light-years away in a well-studied patch of
sky called the COSMOS field (for Cosmic Evolution Survey). Each dot is a
voracious black hole at the heart of a galaxy, actively feeding off a
surrounding disk of material. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other
telescopes have identified many of the black holes in this field, but
some are so heavily obscured in gas and dust that NuSTAR's higher-energy
X-ray observations are needed to characterize and understand them.
Astronomers hope to use NuSTAR to provide new demographics on the
numbers, types and distances to black holes that populate our universe.
"This is a hot topic in astronomy," said Francesca Civano of Yale
University, New Haven, Conn. "We want to understand how black holes
grew in the past and the degree to which they are obscured."
The ongoing research will help explain how black holes and galaxies grow and interact with each other.
NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
also in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Va.
Its instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL; the
University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University, N.Y.; NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; the Danish Technical
University in Denmark; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
Livermore, Calif.; ATK Aerospace Systems, Goleta, Calif., and with
support from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) Science Data Center, Rome,
Italy.
NuSTAR's mission operations center is at UC Berkeley, with ASI
providing its equatorial ground station located at Malindi, Kenya. The
mission's outreach program is based at Sonoma State University, Rohnert
Park, Calif. NASA's Explorer Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is
managed by Caltech for NASA.
For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/nustar and http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/.
