The amazing spectacle could easily be a holy apparition, with the image of a bright hand in the sky poised to give a blessing. NASA even names the visual phenomenon the 'Hand of God,' for the uncanny depiction. The Great Falls Tribune, however, clarifies that the image actually depicts the exploded remains of a dying star.

Fox News reports that 17,000 light-years away, a star exploded into 'an enormous cloud of material.' The explosion was caught by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. The x-ray appearance of the hand image results from the unique visualization of the NuSTAR, as it perceives and translates cosmic images using high-energy and low-energy x-rays.

In a statement, the NuSTAR Mission confirmed that the image they captured shows a pulsar wind nebula, 'a dying star and the cloud of materials left over from the star after it exploded. The particles are interacting with nearby magnetic fields, causing the particles to glow in the image,' according to the Great Falls Tribune.

Scientists admit that they cannot determine whether the cloud of the star's remains instantly shaped into a hand or if the material's interaction with other particles has caused it to look like a holy apparition. Hongjun An, of McGill University in Montreal said,  "We don't know if the hand shape is an optical illusion; with NuSTAR, the hand looks more like a fist, which is giving us some clues," according to the Daily News.

Although it is certain that the visual spectacle caused by the 'Hand of God' is purely an astrophysical phenomena, zealous religious believers might argue that apparitions, much like miracles, rely on natural occurrences to be revealed. For this crowd, the question the public should be asking is, "what is the message this time?"

Fox News notes that in Psychology, perceiving a certain shape or image in an otherwise natural or familiar scene is called pareidolia. This explains why children may imagine the shape of animals formed by clouds in the sky, or that people could see the 'man in the moon.'