A Hand in the Sky?

Today I formally accepted a graduate offer from Penn State's Astronomy dept, so I figured it would be appropriate to have an astro-themed post.  So, in honor of my impending poverty/insantiy:

Earlier today, Nonberg found a cool picture and asked me if I had seen it:

I hadn't, so I decided to look it up for myself.  To my suprise (I thought this might have been faked), this is a legitimate picture of the region around pulsar PSR1509-58.  The pulsar is in the central bright spot.  It's an x-ray image, though, so it was an x-ray camera known as Chandra that took it, and you wouldn't be able to see this with your eyes.  Unless you're superman.  Also, since x-rays don't really have color, the colors are fake: blue means higher energy x-rays and red means lower.

Pulsars are pretty sweet: they're stars that have run out of fuel and collapsed into small (~10km) balls of neutrons known (so creatively) as neutron stars.  More than that, though, pulsars have crazy magnetic fields (15 trillion times stronger than Earth's) and are spinning really fast (this one spins about 7 times per second).  This pulsar, like many others, has at least one jet of material/energy that it is shooting out (to the lower left).  This kind of energetic outflow, along with the large amount of x-rays it produces, is what has disturbed the surrounding material to glow like a hand, and is also exciting the nearby "red" gas cloud RCW 89.

An interesting sidenote is that, when you look at pulsars with a radio telescope (as Joel Weisberg does), they often have spots of radio emission that sweep across your vision as they rotate.  This produces a very regular series of radio beeps, with periods of milliseconds to seconds.  Because they are so regular, one might mistake these for radio signals from aliens: the discoverers of the first pulsar even named it LGM-1, standing for Little Green Men.

Now, some people might interpret the first picture as the hand of a supreme being, perhaps reaching for something (a stapler?  a can of beer?).  But I'm pretty sure most supreme beings have two hands, so I managed to find a picture of the other:

So this particular supreme being is apparantly flipping us off with its other hand.  And yes, this is a real picture, taken by Hubble, of (a small part of) the Carina Nebula.  Weird, huh?