Astronomers piece together image of the Crab Nebula
More than 900 years ago, in 1054, Chinese astronomers saw a bright supernova explosion. It resulted in the Crab Nebula, found 6,500 light-years from Earth. Now, astronomers have produced a highly detailed image of it.
By combining data from telescopes spanning nearly the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum, the Hubble Space Telescope’s crisp visible-light view, and the infrared perspective of the Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers managed to obtain the detailed image of the Crab Nebula.
According to NASA’s Jet Propolsion Laboratory, the Crab Nebula has at its center a super-dense neutron star, rotating once every 33 milliseconds, shooting out rotating lighthouse-like beams of radio waves and light — a pulsar (the bright dot at image center). The nebula‘s intricate shape is caused by a complex interplay of the pulsar, a fast-moving wind of particles coming from the pulsar, and material originally ejected by the supernova explosion and by the star itself before the explosion.
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The image combines data from five different telescopes: the VLA (radio) in red; Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared) in yellow; Hubble Space Telescope (visible) in green; XMM-Newton (ultraviolet) in blue; and Chandra X-ray Observatory (X-ray) in purple.
The new VLA, Hubble, and Chandra observations all were made at nearly the same time in November of 2012. A team of scientists led by Gloria Dubner of the Institute of Astronomy and Physics (IAFE), the National Council of Scientific Research (CONICET), and the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina then made a thorough analysis of the newly revealed details in a quest to gain new insights into the complex physics of the object.
“Comparing these new images, made at different wavelengths, is providing us with a wealth of new detail about the Crab Nebula. Though the Crab has been studied extensively for years, we still have much to learn about it,” Dubner said.
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