Post by Wes on Feb 19, 2010 23:55:09 GMT 10
The gas colored red in this false-color image is from a nebula named RCW 89, which is leftover gas from the original explosion of the supernova that formed the neutron star. It’s close enough to the neutron star that when the beam of matter and energy slam into it, it heats up and glows. The beams are extremely high energy (colored blue in the image), and the gas in RCW 89 doesn’t get quite so hot, so it emits lower-energy X-rays.
But look at the red nebula: see how there are lots of hot spots, arranged in a loop or a horseshoe? It turns out the neutron star isn’t just spinning, it’s also wobbling like a top does as it spins down. This process, called precession, makes the beams point in different directions over time, basically carving out a giant circle in the sky. That loop in the red gas is actually the historic record of where that beam hit the gas over the past millennium! In fact, astronomers could measure how hot those knots of gas are and determine their age, and find that they have been emitting X-rays for a little over 1000 years, consistent with the date of the explosion. In fact, as you go around the loop, each knot is slightly hotter then the next, which is just what you expect from a moving beam heating up the gas.
That also explains the fingers, too: each is a tower of gas heated by the beam as it made its giant sweeping circle in the sky. So not only do they look like fingers, they’re also actually pointing to the knots of gas in RCW 89, the neutron star’s way of saying "You’re next."
The energies involved here are nothing short of mind-numbing. The clumps of gas in RCW 89 are so hot that they are storing the same amount of energy as the Sun gives off in 3 million years. If that really were a giant hand reaching for RCW 89, it better be prepared for a nasty burn.
blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/04/09/the-cosmic-hand-of-destruction/