Can you imagine being able to see the “bones” of a ghostly hand in space? Although it may seem completely outlandish, that’s exactly what two of NASA‘s X-ray telescopes have achieved by combining their images to reveal the “bony” magnetic field of a surprising hand-shaped space structure.
The images taken by both telescopes show the behavior of a collapsed, dead star that continues to live in the form of a “pulsar wind nebula“: jets of energized matter and antimatter particles combined with an intense wind.
In 2001, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory observed the pulsar PSR B1509-58 for the first time and revealed that its pulsar wind nebula (named MSH 15-52) resembles a human hand. The pulsar is located at the base of the “palm” of the nebula, situated 16,000 light-years away from Earth.
Now, NASA’s new X-ray telescope, the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), has observed MSH 15-52 for about 17 days, the longest time it has looked at any object since its launch in December 2021.
“The IXPE data gives us the first map of the magnetic field in the ‘hand’,” said Roger Romani of Stanford University in California, who led the study. “The charged particles producing the X-rays travel along the magnetic field, determining the basic shape of the nebula, much like bones do in a person’s hand.”
The IXPE provides information about the orientation of the electric field of X-rays, determined by the magnetic field of the X-ray source, a process known as “X-ray polarization.”
In large regions of MSH 15-52, the amount of polarization is remarkably high, reaching the maximum level expected by theoretical studies. To achieve this strength, the magnetic field must be very straight and uniform, indicating low turbulence in those regions of the pulsar wind nebula.
A particularly interesting feature of MSH 15-52 is a bright jet of X-rays directed from the pulsar to the “wrist” at the bottom of the image. The new IXPE data reveal that the polarization at the start of the jet is low, likely because this is a turbulent region with complex and “tangled” magnetic fields associated with the generation of high-energy particles.
X-rays are a well-known diagnostic medical tool for humans. Although in this case, they have been used for other purposes, as you have seen, they also reveal information that is hidden from plain sight for us.
