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Crab Nebula - Blog Posts
Spectacular death. Spectacular star. Your crushed heart remains bright from afar. You’re looking at a composite image of the Crab Nebula, located 6,500 light-years away. The white dot in the center — an extremely dense ball of neutrons just 12 miles across but with the same mass as our Sun — is all that remains from a star that exploded in 1054 A.D. Had the blast occurred 50 light-years away, its intense radiation would have wiped out most life forms on Earth. Spectacular death. Spectacular star. We’re grateful we can admire you from afar.
Messier 1 - The Crab Nebula
Potentially Humanity’s First Historically Observed Supernova
The Crab Nebula is the first astronomical object identified with a historical supernova explosion. Around in the year 1054, Chinese astronomers identified a large bright object that suddenly and mysteriously appeared in the sky. The explosion was so bright that it was even visible during the day time.
700 years later the super nova remnant faded in brightness as it expanded and was nearly forgotten. The Super Nova Remnant was rediscovered in 1758 ( officially re-recorded) by Charles Messier while he was creating a catalog of mysterious objects that looked like comets but were not.
We now know that the beautiful Crab Nebula is the magnificent result of the death of a star, which was unknown to Charles Messier and the Chinese Astronomers that discovered the Object. Now, thanks to space telescopes such as Hubble and Chandra, we can image the Nebula in great detail. The bottom left image is of a small region of the Crab Nebula. It shows “Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities in its intricate filamentary structure” and gives scientists a better understanding of the death of stars. The image to the bottom left shows combined visible light data from Hubble and x-ray data from Chandra.
Credit: NASA/Hubble/Chandra
Pride Flags Colorpicked from Nebulas
