Huge ghosting was photographed in space

A huge ghost structure stretching after a shining cloud of dust was photographed in space by NASA’s X-ray telescope, the Chandra space telescope.

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The “hand” was created by the death of a massive star; after the supernova explosion, a rapidly rotating, extremely dense stellar remnant called a pulsar was formed – read In a NASA statement.

The pulsar created a bubble of charged particles around it, which, together with the debris from the starburst, formed a 150-year-old hand-like structure in space. The hand pictured reaches for a glowing cloud of gas, the RCW 89.

The ghosting pulsar, MSH 15-52, is located roughly 17,000 light-years from Earth.

Astronomers believe the light of the cosmic catastrophe reached us about 1,700 years ago, making it one of the youngest supernova remnants in the Milky Way system ever observed.

The Chandra space telescope had previously photographed the MSH 15-52 in 2009, but the research team overseeing the operation of the device has only recently examined the object in more detail.

A study published in the astronomical journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters found that the velocity of the shock wave observed at the ends of the fingers reaches 14.5 million kilometers per hour.

The material closer to the “palm” is moving at an even higher speed of 17.7 million kilometers per hour.

This may seem like an astonishing value at first glance, but experts estimate that the material could have moved even faster in the past, at an average speed of 48.2 million kilometers per hour (otherwise a cosmic formation of this magnitude could not have formed). The flow of material may have been slowed by the RCW 89.

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The Chandra X-ray telescope was launched in July 1999 and has been monitoring space objects for more than 20 years.

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