That above image1 was posted to NASA’s Chandra Diagnoses Cause of Fracture in Galactic “Bone”. It depicts the kind of scale that sometimes stumbles folks trying to grasp the sheer joyfear of the universe:

The researchers think the pulsar likely caused the fracture by smashing into G359.13 at a speed between one million and two million miles per hour. This collision distorted the magnetic field in the bone, causing the radio signal to also become warped.

At about 230 light-years long, G359.13 is one of the longest and brightest of these structures in the Milky Way. To put this into context, there are more than 800 stars within that distance from Earth. G359.13 is located about 26,000 light-years from Earth, near the center of the Milky Way.

It’s the kind of scale, and the kind of language/event, which can deeply drive the creative mind to want to write something in the vein of comic horror. Or, in this case, maybe the bone of cosmic horror.

Makes sense why Lovecraft early love of astronomy prefigured many of his later cosmic masterpieces.

BONUS: I am just now trying out WordPress’s built in footnotes. Like other blog-experiments, I may or may not do such a thing again.

  1. Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Northwestern Univ./F. Yusef-Zadeh et al; Radio: NRF/SARAO/MeerKat; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk. Taken from https://www.nasa.gov/missions/chandra/nasas-chandra-diagnoses-cause-of-fracture-in-galactic-bone/ on 2025-10-21. ↩︎