About 1,500 years ago, a giant star appeared in our Milky Way Galaxy. Nuclear fuel runs out, burns up and collapses. They form very dense objects called neutron stars. Around which the neutron star revolves there are strong magnetic fields or pulsars. These things are like physical experiments that cannot be replicated on Earth. Small pulsars produce jets of matter and antimatter that shoot out from the poles of the pulsar. Along with strong winds, it forms a “pulsar wind nebula” driven by winds generated by the pulsar at its center.
In 2001, NASA’s Chandra Space Telescope observed a pulsar called PSR B1509-58 for the first time, revealing that its pulsar’s wind nebula, known as MSH 15-52, resembled a human hand. The pulsar is located at the base of the nebula’s “palm,” MSH 15-52, 16,000 light-years from Earth. Photography 2021
Scientists from Stamford University, California, US, said the IXPE data provided the first map of the magnetic field at MSH 15-52, where charged particles that produce X-rays move along the magnetic field. To determine the basic shape of the nebula in the same way as the bones in our hands.
Credit: X-Ray: NASA/CXC/Stanford University./R. Roman et al. (Chandra); NASA/MSFC (IXPE); Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/DECaPS; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Schmidt)