I found an amazingly amazing image while I was about to check my e-mail through Yahoo! portal. The image was image captured by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The observatory was named after an Indian-American physicist, Subrahmanya Chandrasekar, who is known for determining the mass limit for white dwarf stars to become neutron stars. Well, thanks to 3 astronomy classes in my uni. for the history!!
hehe..
Red color represents low-energy X-rays, the medium range color is green, and the most energetic ones are colored blue. The blue hand-like structure was created by energy emanating from the nebula around the dying star namely PSR B1509-58. The red areas are from neighbouring gas cloud called RCW 80.
Credit:
NASA/CXC/SAP/P. Slane, et al.
So, back to the image.
Stated that the Chandra Observatory, with its high energy X-rays emanating from nebula^ around one star called PSR B1509-58 that have been colored blue and reveal a structure that looks like a hand reaching for some eternal red cosmic light.
PSR B1509-58 was a tiny and dying star, but still powerful and spinning, lighting up it's surrounding. They usually call that kind of star with pulsar. The star was long ago collapsed in to a sphere just 12 miles (19,308 km) in diameter after running out of the fuel.
Since that that the star now spins around, as what every pulsars do, it now creates that amazingly amazing image.
What's That Actually?
Stong magnetic field, measured to be about 15 trillion times stronger that Earth's magnetic field, drives an energetic wind of electrons and ions away from the pulsar. And as the electrons move through the magnetized nebula, they radiate their energy as X-rays.
And the red light was actually a neighbouring gas cloud, called RCW 89, energized into glowing by th
e fingers of the recently stated pulsar.
The scene, which spans 150 light-years^^, is about 17,000 light years away. So, what we see now is how it actually looked 17,000 years ago. The thing is that the light was there 17,000 years ago, and to reach us here, the light needs 17,000 years. So, the scene captured was actually happened 17,000 years ago.
^NEBULA is a cloud of gas and dust in outer space, visible in the night sky either as an indistinct bright patch or as a dark silhouette against other luminous matter.
^^LIGHT-YEAR is a unit of astronomical distance equivalent to the distace that light travels in one year, which is 9,460,700,000,000 km.
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