This release features a composite image of a pulsar wind nebula, which strongly resembles a ghostly purple hand with sparkling fingertips. A pulsar is a highly magnetized collapsed star that rotates and creates jets of matter flowing away from its poles. These jets, along with intense winds of particles, form pulsar wind nebulae. Here, the pulsar wind nebula known as MSH 15-52 resembles a hazy purple cloud set against a black, starry backdrop. Both NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) have observed MSH 15-52. Their observations revealed that the shape of this pulsar wind nebula strongly resembles a human hand, including five fingers, a palm and wrist. The bright white spot near the base of the palm is the pulsar itself. The three longest fingertips of the hand-shape point toward our upper right, or 1:00 on a clock face. There, a small, mottled, orange and yellow cloud appears to sparkle or glow like embers. This orange cloud is part of the remains of the supernova explosion that created the pulsar. The backdrop of stars was captured in infrared light.
Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer contributed to this composite image of a nebula that resembles a glowing hand.
NASA/CXC/Stanford Univ./R. Romani et al.

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.

CNN  — 

The cosmos is full of mysteries waiting to be solved, and some of them appear especially eerie with the arrival of Halloween.

A haunting “face” on Jupiter and a ghostly, skeletal hand-shaped nebula are just a couple of creepy celestial features recently spotted by NASA missions.

Jupiter’s eerie ‘face’

The Juno mission, orbiting Jupiter and some of its largest moons since 2016, made its 54th close flyby of the largest planet in our solar system on September 7. The JunoCam instrument captured swirling clouds and storms in Jupiter’s northern regions along the planet’s terminator, or the line dividing the day side from the night side.

On Sept. 7, 2023, during its 54th close flyby of Jupiter, NASA's Juno mission captured this view of an area in the giant planet's far northern regions called Jet N7. The image shows turbulent clouds and storms along Jupiter's terminator, the dividing line between the day and night sides of the planet. The low angle of sunlight highlights the complex topography of features in this region, which scientists have studied to better understand the processes playing out in Jupiter's atmosphere.
Jupiter's swirling atmosphere appears to include a face in this image taken by JunoCam.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Vladimir Tarasov

A Picasso-like face appears to emerge from the turbulent atmosphere in a phenomenon called pareidolia, in which viewers spy faces and other recognizable objects within random patterns.

The raw data, available to the public on the JunoCam website, was processed by citizen scientist Vladimir Tarasov. During the close pass, Juno flew about 4,800 miles (7,700 kilometers) above the planet’s cloud tops, where the low angle of sunlight added to the dramatic nature of the image.

X-rays spot celestial bones

X-rays were first used by physicist Wilhelm Röntgen to image the bones of his wife’s hand in 1895 — and now, two X-ray telescopes have revealed the “bones” of a glowing hand-shaped cloud that formed in the aftermath of a star’s collapse.

The cloud of gas and dust, or nebula, was created 1,500 years ago when a massive star burned through its interior nuclear fuel and collapsed. The nebula, known as MSH 15-52, is located about 16,000 light-years from Earth.

This release features a composite image of a pulsar wind nebula, which strongly resembles a ghostly purple hand with sparkling fingertips. A pulsar is a highly magnetized collapsed star that rotates and creates jets of matter flowing away from its poles. These jets, along with intense winds of particles, form pulsar wind nebulae. Here, the pulsar wind nebula known as MSH 15-52 resembles a hazy purple cloud set against a black, starry backdrop. Both NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) have observed MSH 15-52. Their observations revealed that the shape of this pulsar wind nebula strongly resembles a human hand, including five fingers, a palm and wrist. The bright white spot near the base of the palm is the pulsar itself. The three longest fingertips of the hand-shape point toward our upper right, or 1:00 on a clock face. There, a small, mottled, orange and yellow cloud appears to sparkle or glow like embers. This orange cloud is part of the remains of the supernova explosion that created the pulsar. The backdrop of stars was captured in infrared light.
Chandra's original image of the nebula shows captured the pulsar, the bright white spot within the "palm," while the orange cloud are the remnants of a supernova explosion.
NASA/MSFC

As the star collapsed, it left behind a dense remnant known as a neutron star. Rapidly rotating neutron stars that have strong magnetic fields are called pulsars. Newly formed pulsars send out jets of energized material and have powerful winds, which created this particular nebula.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory observed the pulsar, known as PSR B1509-58, for the first time in 2001. The bright pulsar was spotted within the base of the “palm” of the hand-shaped nebula. A jet from the pulsar can be traced down to the “wrist.”

Map of a nebula’s magnetic field

More than 20 years later, NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, or IXPE, spent 17 days observing the nebula. This is the space observatory’s longest observing campaign since launching in December 2021. The results of the new telescope’s operations were published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal.

“The IXPE data gives us the first map of the magnetic field in the ‘hand,’” said lead study author Roger Romani, professor of physics at Stanford University in California, in a statement “The charged particles producing the X-rays travel along the magnetic field, determining the basic shape of the nebula, like the bones do in a person’s hand.”

The telescope’s unique observational capabilities are allowing scientists to determine where particles in the nebula are accelerated by turbulent regions within the magnetic field.