Video Credit: NASA
Hubble and the Crab Nebula
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Tag Archives: Crab Nebula
A UV View of the Crab Nebula
About 7,500 years ago, a star went supernova. The Crab Nebula is the wreckage of that supernova whose explosion was seen on Earth in the year AD 1054. The expanding cloud of gas is located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. This false color composite of three ultraviolet images taken by the UV Optical Telescope carried on the Swift satellite highlights the hot gas in the supernova remnant. The image is constructed from exposures using these filters centered at 260 nm (red), at 225 nM (green), and centered at 193 nm (blue). (Click the image to embiggen it.)
Image Credit: NASA
The Crab With The Neutron Heart
This Hubble image peers deep into the core of the Crab Nebula, revealing its beating heart. At its center are the remnants of a supernova which sends out clock-like pulses of radiation and waves of charged particles. The neutron star at the very center of the Crab Nebula has about the same mass as the Sun, but it’s compressed into an incredibly dense sphere that is only a few miles across. Spinning 30 times a second, the neutron star ticks along, shooting out detectable beams of energy.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
Sonification: The Crab Nebula
Video Credit: NASA
Radio Bursts for the Crab Pulsar
Video Credit: NASA
The Crab’s Neutron Star
This Hubble image peers deep into the core of the Crab Nebula, revealing its beating heart. At its center are the remnants of a supernova which sends out clock-like pulses of radiation and waves of charged particles. The neutron star at the very center of the Crab Nebula has about the same mass as the Sun, but it’s compressed into an incredibly dense sphere that is only a few miles across. Spinning 30 times a second, the neutron star ticks along, shooting out detectable beams of energy.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
A Wide Field View of the Crab
The Crab Nebula (aka Messier 1, NGC 1952, and Taurus A) is the remnant of a supernova explosion which was observed by Chinese astronomers in 1054. The tangled filaments visible in this picture are the remains of the exploded star which are still expanding outwards at about 1500 km/s.
Image Credit: ESO
A Multi-Wavelength Crab
This composite view of the Crab Nebula uses data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (blue and white), the Hubble Space Telescope (purple), and the Spitzer Space Telescope (pink). The nebula is the remnant of a supernova that was seen on Earth in AD 1054.
It’s powered by a pulsar, a quickly spinning neutron star formed when a original star ran out nuclear fuel and collapsed. The combination of rapid rotation and a strong magnetic field in the Crab generates jets of matter and anti-matter moving away from the pulsar’s poles and an intense stellar wind flowing out of its equator.
Image Credit: NASA
A 3D View of the Crab Nebula
Video Credit: NASA
The Crab Nebula
In 1054, observers around the world reported the appearance of a “new star” in the direction of the constellation Taurus. The remnant of that supernova is called the Crab Nebula, and it is powered by a quickly spinning, highly magnetized neutron star called a pulsar. The pulsar was formed when the massive star ran out of its nuclear fuel and collapsed. The combination of rapid rotation and a strong magnetic field in the Crab generates an intense electromagnetic field that creates jets of matter and anti-matter moving away from both the north and south poles of the pulsar and an intense wind flowing out in the equatorial direction.
This composite image of the nebula was created with data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue and white), the Hubble Space Telescope (purple), and the Spitzer Space Telescope (pink).
Image Credit: NASA
The Heart of the Crab
The supernova explosion that formed the Crab Nebula was first seen on Earth in the year 1054. In 2000, astronomers released this image of the still-evolving center of the explosion. The composite photograph was taken in colors emitted by specific elements including hydrogen (orange), nitrogen (red), sulfur (pink), and oxygen (green). The result looks a lot like a Jackson Pollock painting. The complex array of gas filaments are rushing out from the explosion at over 5,000,000 km/h. Even at that tremendous speed, it takes over 600 years to cross the 3 light year wide frame of this picture.
The rapidly spinning neutron star remnant of supernova is visible as the lower of the two bright stars near the center of the image. The Crab Nebula (aka M1) is about 6,500 light-years away in the direction the constellation of Taurus.
Image Credit: NASA
An X-Ray Tour of the Crab Nebula
Video Credit: NASA
The Crab Nebula Explosion
This animation is an artist’s rendering of what the stellar explosion that resulted in the Crab Nebula might have looked like.
Video Credit: ESA
The Heart of the Crab
Here’s NASA’s description of this video—
This video starts with a composite image of the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant that was assembled by combining data from five telescopes spanning nearly the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum: the Very Large Array, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, the XMM-Newton Observatory, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
The video dissolves to the red-colored radio-light view that shows how a neutron star’s fierce “wind” of charged particles from the central neutron star energized the nebula, causing it to emit the radio waves. The yellow-colored infrared image includes the glow of dust particles absorbing ultraviolet and visible light. The green-colored Hubble visible-light image offers a very sharp view of hot filamentary structures that permeate this nebula. The blue-colored ultraviolet image and the purple-colored X-ray image shows the effect of an energetic cloud of electrons driven by a rapidly rotating neutron star at the center of the nebula.
Video Credit: NASA, ESA, J. DePasquale (STScI)
An Expanding Crab
This series of images of the Crab Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope reveal wave-like structures like ripples in a pond expanding outward from the “heart” of an exploded star. The beating heart of the nebula is the crushed core of the exploded star, a supernova. The remnant neutron star has about the same mass as the sun but is squeezed into an ultra-dense sphere that is only a few miles across. It’s a tremendous dynamo, spinning 30 times a second. The rapidly spinning neutron star is visible in the image as the bright object just below the center of the image. The bright object to the left of the neutron star is a foreground or background star.
Image Credits: NASA and ESA
Acknowledgment: J. Hester (Arizona State University)
The Heart of the Crab
This Hubble image peers deep into the core of the Crab Nebula, revealing its beating heart. At its center are the remnants of a supernova which sends out clock-like pulses of radiation and waves of charged particles. The neutron star at the very center of the Crab Nebula has about the same mass as the Sun, but it’s compressed into an incredibly dense sphere that is only a few miles across. Spinning 30 times a second, the neutron star ticks along, shooting out detectable beams of energy.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
A Wide Field View of a Crab
The Crab Nebula (aka Messier 1, NGC 1952, and Taurus A) is the remnant of a supernova explosion which was observed by Chinese astronomers in 1054. The tangled filaments visible in this picture are the remains of the exploded star which are still expanding outwards at about 1500 km/s.
Image Credit: ESO
The Crab Nebula
In 1054 AD, Chinese astronomers were startled by the appearance of a new star, so bright it could be seen in broad daylight for several weeks. Today, the Crab Nebula is what’s left of the supernova explosion they witnessed.
Image Credit: NASA
International Crab
The Crab nebula is the remnant of a supernova explosion recorded by Chinese astronomers in the year 1054. This is composite view of the Crab nebula was assembled using data from the Herschel Space Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. Herschel is a European Space Agency (ESA) mission with important NASA contributions, and Hubble is a NASA mission with important ESA contributions.
Hubble‘s view of the nebula at visible wavelengths used three different filters sensitive to the emission from oxygen and sulphur ions and is shown here in blue. Herschel’s far-infrared image reveals the emission from dust in the nebula and is shown here in red.
Image Credit: ESA/NASA
The Crab Nebula in UV
About 7,500 years ago, a star went supernova. The Crab Nebula is the wreckage of that supernova whose explosion was seen on Earth in the year AD 1054. The expanding cloud of gas is located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. This false color composite of three ultraviolet images taken by the UV Optical Telescope carried on the Swift satellite highlights the hot gas in the supernova remnant. The image is constructed from exposures using these filters centered at 260 nm (red), at 225 nM (green), and centered at 193 nm (blue). (Click the image to embiggen it.)
Image Credit: NASA
The Heart of the Crab
The supernova explosion that formed the Crab Nebula was first seen on Earth in the year 1054. In 2000, astronomers released this image of the still-evolving center of the explosion. The composite photograph was taken in colors emitted by specific elements including hydrogen (orange), nitrogen (red), sulfur (pink), and oxygen (green). The result looks a lot like a Jackson Pollock painting. The complex array of gas filaments are rushing out from the explosion at over 5,000,000 km/h. Even at that tremendous speed, it takes over 600 years to cross the 3 light year wide frame of this picture.
The rapidly spinning neutron star remnant of supernova is visible as the lower of the two bright stars near the center of the image. The Crab Nebula (aka M1) is about 6,500 light-years away in the direction the constellation of Taurus.
Image Credit: NASA
A Glorious Cosmic Mess
This is the sort of glorious mess that is left when a star explodes. It’s the Crab Nebula, the result of a supernova seen in 1054 AD. The nebula’s filaments are not only tremendously complex, but appear to have less mass than expelled in the original supernova and a higher speed than expected from a free explosion. This picture was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a false color image, the three colors chosen for scientific interest. The Crab Nebula spans about 10 light-years. There’s a pulsar at its center—a neutron star as massive as the Sun but with only few miles in diameter. The Crab Pulsar rotates about 30 times each second.
Image Credit: NASA
M1
This is the Crab Nebular, the sort of mess that is left when a star explodes. The Crab Nebula, the result of a supernova seen in 1054 AD, spans about 10 light-years. In the nebula’s very center lies a pulsar: a neutron star roughly as massive as the Sun but with only a few kilometers in diameter. The Crab Pulsar rotates about 30 times each second.
This image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s also know as M1, the first nebula in the Messier catalog.
Image Credit: NASA