The Hand of God Watchman Report 14-14

The astronomers who captured this image with a NASA space telescope call it the “Hand of God.”

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

NuSTAR says the star is about 12 miles in diameter and spins 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.