a cosmic wave

Well, boys and girls..the brand new, hot off the press photo gem below is what NASA calls a fantabulous x-ray nebula. Well, not so much the fantabulous part..that’s Mama’s descriptor. It’s official name is B1509. Uh, hello. What the Aeronautics & Space Admin. may lack in creative monikers, they make up for in a lot of PhD’s and really cool pics, I guess.

The center of this baby pulsar is a star, only twelve measly miles in diameter. It used to be a big bad sista back in the day but ended up running out of gas, so to speak, and collapsed in on itself. Kind of what happened to me after my 40th. It's new compact bod just happens to be spinning at seven times a second, thereby spewing some serious energy and blowing a mondo bunch of electrons and ions outward and away. Its surface magnetic field is 15 trillion times greater than ours. As this junk blows through this super charged mind-blower and bumps into a gas cloud or two, it radiates and creates some cool eye-candy for us humanoids.

Did I mention she’s a young 1700 years old, a mere 150 light years across and is shacking up about 17,000 light years from the good ole U.S. of A.? Those brainiacs at Chandra Observatory are peeing their pants about now. And me? I’m thinking the lousy lukewarm Starbucks latte I got this morning may not have really been that big of a deal afterall.

Really gotta hand it to ya, NASA...great shot. Ba dum dum.