The Crab

Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hes­ter and A. Loll (Ari­zona State University)

In the year 1054, Japan­ese, Chi­nese and Native Amer­i­can astronomers recorded a vio­lent event. They saw a star that hadn’t been there before. It turned out to be a super­nova that formed the Crab Neb­ula and it’s one of the ear­li­est recorded astro­nom­i­cal events by humans.

Also known as M1 and NGC 1952, the Crab Neb­ula is the left­overs after a star explodes. The stream­ers found in the Crab Neb­ula are the remains of that star flung out dur­ing the huge explo­sion. To astronomers who first looked at the night sky, this patch of light looked like a crab. At the cen­ter of the Crab Neb­ula is a neu­tron star. A neu­tron star is as mas­sive as the sun but is pressed into a ball the size of a small town. It is very dense and spins very quickly. The Crab Pul­sar rotates about 30 times a second.

The Crab Neb­ula spans about 10 light years. It is 6,000 light years away toward the con­stel­la­tion of Tau­rus the Bull. Tau­rus is begin­ning to rise in the late evening now and dur­ing the fall will rise ear­lier and earlier.

NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope took this image of M1 in 1999 and 2000. The pic­ture is one of the largest ever taken by Hub­ble. It is the best image taken of the Crab Nebula.