14:25 10 January 2014
From a black hole rainbow to the hand of God, a flood of spectacular new images wowed the American Astronomical Society meeting this week. See the best of the cosmic treats here. Victoria Jaggard
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Sometimes when you reach for the stars, the stars reach back. This cloud of gas and dust has been nicknamed the Hand of God, due to its eerie shape. The cloud is made of material that a star ejected when it exploded and is now being sculpted by the stellar core that remained.
The core is spinning about seven times per second, spewing jets of high-speed particles from its poles; the jets heat up the debris cloud and make it shine in X-rays. This new image of the "hand" combines data from NASA's NuSTAR and Chandra space telescopes, letting astronomers study its structure in both high and low-energy X-rays. This should help determine whether the cloud is truly shaped like a hand or just appears that way in such images.
(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/McGill)
