Giant Ghost Hand Reaches Out From Space Right on Halloween Day

Halloween is such a highly-regarded celebration that not only communities make the most of it, but even government organizations. From this group, few are as active as NASA, who for years has been delighting us with proof that the larger Universe celebrates Halloween as well. It does so by releasing images from space each and every one of us can interpret as we like.

This year that proof comes in the form of a giant ghostly hand, with visible bones, reaching out from the darkness towards a patch of light as to grab hold of someone's soul.

The image is not some computer-generated snapshot of something that could be, but something that really exists, so far out into space it's extremely hard to imagine.

What you're looking at here is not some aethereal entity, but the remnants of a star that collapsed onto itself and became a rotating neutron star. Once it did that, it started generating massive magnetic fields, shooting out jets of matter and antimatter.

Driven by stellar wind, matter and antimatter moves away from the poles of the pulsar, forming something that's called a pulsar wind nebula. Somehow, the nebula organized itself to appear to us as a ghost hand, with the bones of the palm and fingers formed by charged particles that produce X-rays.

What you're looking at are images resulted from a combination of the observations performed by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which first spotted the structure in 2001, and the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) instrument.

IXPE was pointed at that region of the sky (pulsar PSR B1509-58 and nebula MSH 15-52, located 16,000 light-years from Earth) recently, and kept looking at the place for 17 days, "the longest it has looked at any single object since it launched in December 2021."

IXPE is floating 370 miles (600 km) above our planet's equator, and its main mission is to look for the X-rays coming from the remnants of exploded stars and particle jets coming from black holes. It does this by hunting something never hunted before: it looks at the polarization of X-rays.

IXPE provided not only this stunning image of a large ghost hand, but also the "first map of the magnetic field in the hand," helping the people looking at the sky learn more about how pulsars can act as particle accelerators.

The results of IXPE's long survey of the pulsar, minus the stunning photos you can also experience as a sort of motion pictures in the video below, have been published in the Astrophysical Journal.