Hubble’s Close-Up of the Crab Nebula’s Beating Heart

The Crab Nebula is one of the most historic and intensively studied remnants of a supernova, an exploding star. Chinese astronomers recorded the explosion in 1054 A.D. Today the nebula, bright enough to see in amateur telescopes, lies 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image looks deep into its core, at the “beating heart” of the nebula.

The neutron star

At the center sits a neutron star — the crushed core of the star that exploded. It has about the mass of the Sun, packed into an incredibly dense sphere only a few miles across. It spins 30 times a second, sweeping out beams of energy that make it appear to pulse. In the image it is the rightmost of the two bright stars near the center.

The region around it sends out clock-like pulses of radiation and tsunamis of charged particles embedded in magnetic fields — a showcase of extreme physics and unimaginable cosmic violence.

What the colors show

• Red — glowing gas forming a swirling tangle of cavities and filaments, the expanding, tattered debris of the explosion.
• Ghostly blue — radiation given off by electrons spiraling at nearly the speed of light in the powerful magnetic field around the collapsed core.

Bright wisps stream outward from the neutron star at half the speed of light, forming an expanding ring. They are thought to come from a shock wave that turns the neutron star’s high-speed wind into extremely energetic particles.

The first pulsar of its kind

When this “heartbeat” signal was discovered in 1968, astronomers realized they had found a new type of object. The Crab is now the archetype of a class of supernova remnants called pulsars — rapidly spinning neutron stars. These interstellar lighthouse beacons are invaluable for observational experiments on many phenomena, including the measurement of gravity waves.

Sources

Based on "NASA’s Hubble Captures the Beating Heart of the Crab Nebula," NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Image and Video Library; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Image: NASA and ESA; acknowledgment J. Hester (Arizona State University) and M. Weisskopf (NASA Marshall Space Flight Center).