SPACE - The "Hand of God"

"'Hand of God' captured in NASA image" by Jolie Lee, USA Today 1/10/2014

What looks like an X-ray of a hand is actually the remains of a star that has exploded 17,000 light-years away.

The astronomers who captured this image with a NASA space telescope are calling it the "Hand of God."

"We don't know if the hand shape is an optical illusion," said Hongjun An of McGill University, Montreal, Canada, in a statement from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) Mission.

What the image shows is a pulsar wind nebula, a dying star and the cloud of materials left over from the star after it exploded.  The particles are interacting with nearby magnetic fields, causing the particles to glow in the image, according to NuSTAR.

It's unclear if the nebula looks like a hand because of the way the particles are interacting with the magnetic fields, or if the particles are actually shaped like a hand.

NuSTAR says the star itself is about 12 miles in diameter and is spinning at nearly seven times a second.  As the star spins, it spews particles "upheaved during the star's violent death."

The NuSTAR space telescope was launched in June 2012 with the goal of observing black holes, dead and exploded stars and "other extreme objects," according to NuSTAR.