Giant Nebula Hand in Space Photographed

In an old and rare Star Trek comic book, there's this story where the starship Enterprise gets held in space by a giant hand which turns out to be that of a space genie or a pretty physical illusion of one. Anyway, that was a fictional "hand in space." Astronomers have found a real one and it appears to be a right hand reaching out to a red nebula.

The hand in space is really part of pulsar PSR B1509-58. It used to be a star that collapsed on itself due to gravity to a mere 12 miles in diameter. So you can imagine how powerful this piece of matter is and the amount of energy it releases into space as the extremely powerful magnetic field directs subatomic particles like electrons outwards creating x-rays. The "blue hand" is a result of these x-rays from the pulsar and was revealed by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. It is a great example of a simulacrum. This one will likely be used for a lot of astronomy posters.

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Balck Hole Eclipse Viewed in Fornax

Astronomers using the Chandra X-ray observatory of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has photographed for the first time, a supermassive black hole in a state of eclipse with its disk of radioactive gas cloud. The eclipse occured in the galaxy NGC 1365 in the constellation Fornax, the furnace. The event gave them a glimpse into how black holes affect the matter around it.

Jupiter's Northern Lights Twice the Size of Earth

Pictured here are Jupiter's northern lights (aurora borealis) which measure twice the size of Earth. Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, the ultraviolet data is in blue. The magenta flash is a powerful x-ray source taken by the Chandra X-ray observatory. See the animation of a rotating Jupiter on the left. It emits radiation every 45 minutes and was first detected in 1979 by the Einstein x-ray satellite, although the location of the source was unknown. Scientists still don't have an explanation for the emission. It is one of the mysteries of the jovian planet that may take a while to solve.

Thousands of Black Holes Photographed

Starry, starry night? Not really. What appears to be stars or galaxy clusters in this picture are actually black holes colored to identify specific energy levels. This is how the sky may look if you had x-ray vision. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory took most of the black holes pictured here in the constellation Bootes. The inset image of the dark side of the moon is shown for size reference.

Black holes are dead stars that collapsed into themselves. They are hundreds of millions of times more massive than the sun and suck everything around them like a vacuum cleaner---even light.