Cosmic
Crab Nebula
From
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day
The
Crab Pulsar, a city-sized, magnetized neutron star spinning
30 times a second, lies at the center of this tantalizing wide-field image of
the Crab Nebula.
A
spectacular picture of one of our Milky Way's supernova remnants, it combines
optical survey data with X-ray data from the orbiting Chandra Observatory. The composite
was created as part of a celebration of Chandra's 15 year long
exploration of the high
energy cosmos.
Like
a cosmic dynamo the pulsar powers the
X-ray and optical emission from the nebula, accelerating charged particles to
extreme energies to produce the jets and rings glowing in X-rays.
The
innermost ring structure is about a light-year across. With more mass than the
Sun and the density of an atomic nucleus, the spinning pulsar is the collapsed
core of the massive star that exploded, while the nebula is the expanding
remnant of the star's outer layers. The supernova explosion was witnessed in the year 1054.
