NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has captured an image dubbed as the "Hand of God".
According to NASA, the "hand" is made of cloud of material ejected from a star that exploded. NuSTAR was launched into space on June 13, 2012, in order to help NASA explore the high-energy X-ray universe.
"NuSTAR's unique viewpoint, in seeing the highest-energy X-rays, is showing us well-studied objects and regions in a whole new light," Fiona Harrison, the mission's principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement.
The image captured is reportedly beyond our Milky Way galaxy, as the dead star is about 17,000 light-years away, according to a news release.
"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," NASA said.
However, researchers are unsure if pulsar's particles caught on the high-powered telescope appear to be shaped like a hand or are in fact shaped this way.
"We don't know if the hand shape is an optical illusion," Hongjun An of McGill University, Montreal, Canada, said in a statment. "With NuSTAR, the hand looks more like a fist, which is giving us some clues."
Another image captured using the NuSTAR revealed distant, active black holes between three and 10 billion light-years away, according to a news release. Click here to read more about the images captured by NuStar.
