Watching 25 Years of Expansion in the Crab Nebula With the Hubble
📖 Full Retelling
A quarter-century after its first observations of the full Crab Nebula, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken a fresh look at the supernova remnant. The result is an unparalleled, detailed look at the aftermath of a supernova and how it has evolved over Hubble’s long lifetime. A paper detailing the new Hubble observation was published in The Astrophysical Journal.
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Watching 25 Years of Expansion in the Crab Nebula With the Hubble By Evan Gough - March 24, 2026 04:54 PM UTC | Stars In 1054, ancient astronomers in several civilizations around the world witnessed what Chinese astronomers called a "guest star." It appeared suddenly in the sky and lasted for several months. Centuries later, in 1731, an astronomer discovered the Crab Nebula. It became apparent that the Nebula was in the same position in the sky that the guest star had appeared in. The Crab Nebula was the first example of astronomers figuring out that a modern-day sky object corresponded with an ancient supernova explosion. That explosion left behind a special type of neutron star called a pulsar . Pulsars are highly magnetized neutron stars that spin rapidly and emit radiation from their poles. The Crab Nebula is made of elements cast off by the exploding star and illuminated by the pulsar. The pulsar generates what's called synchrotron radiation , and that creates the multi-spectral bluish glow in the nebula's interior that's visible in radio, optical, and x-ray. The different coloured filaments beyond the interior are different chemical elements ionized by the pulsar. Nothing in nature can resist change. As a supernova remnant, it was created when a massive exploding star blasted layers of gas into the space surrounding it. The gas is still expanding nearly a millenium later, and eventually it will disperse until there's no visible nebula at all. The Hubble space telescope created one of the most well-known images in astronomy when it imaged the Crab Nebula in 1999. It used its Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 to capture that iconic image. In 2009, that instrument was replaced with the much superior Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Now, the Hubble has imaged the nebula again, this time with the WFC3, in an effort to track how the expanding nebula has changed. New research in The Astrophysical Journal uses the Hubble's images to investigate how the Crab Nebula has expa...
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