Explanation:
The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on
Charles
Messier's famous list of things which are not comets.
In fact,
the
Crab is now known to be a
supernova remnant,
expanding debris from the death explosion of a massive star.
This intriguing
false-color image combines
data from space-based observatories,
Chandra,
Hubble, and
Spitzer,
to explore the
debris cloud in x-rays (blue-purple),
optical (green), and infrared (red) light.
One of the most exotic objects known to modern astronomers,
the Crab Pulsar,
a neutron star spinning 30 times a second,
is the bright spot near picture center.
Like a cosmic dynamo,
this collapsed remnant of the stellar core
powers the Crab's emission across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Spanning about 12 light-years, the Crab Nebula is
6,500 light-years away in the
constellation
Taurus.
