Astronomy Picture of the Day

Composite Crab


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#95412 by @ 27.10.2006 00:00 - nach oben -
Composite Crab


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
.




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