BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy M1 Crab Nebula

Messier's catalog of nebulous objects begins with M1 the Crab Nebula. In 18th-century telescopes it was just a fuzzy patch, yet imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, it's fascinating and intricate. But what is it? Why is it called the Crab Nebula? And what amazing secret does it hide?

M1 Crab Nebula

The Crab Nebula has a pulsar at the center. Different wavelengths of light give different information about it. In the middle data from optical, infrared and X-ray have been combined. The X-ray image reveals evidence of a spinning disc of super hot gas with high speed jets shooting out in opposite directions of it. The computer model on the right demonstrates how the strong magnetic fields around a neutron star can create repeated flashes of high energy X-rays and gamma rays.

I'd have expected the "Crab Nebula" to be located in the constellation Cancer (the crab), not in Taurus (the bull). But the nebula isn't named for its constellation.

William Parsons, the Third Earl of Rosse (in Ireland) was a keen astronomer. Using his 36-inch reflector at Birr Castle he observed the nebula. Photography wasn't yet advanced enough for astrophotography, so observers still drew what they saw through the telescope. Here is Lord Rosse's 1844 drawing of M1. It seemed vaguely crablike, so that's how the nebula got its name.

At first glance, it looks to me more like a pineapple. And at later glances, still some kind of plant. (But maybe Some-kind-of-plant Nebula would have been a cumbersome nickname.)

Lord Rosse later built the telescope known as the Leviathan at Birr Castle. It was the largest telescope ever built, surpassing that of William Herschel in England.

When he observed the Crab Nebula through the larger telescope it didn't look at all like a crab to him.

This image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is of the heart of M1.



Image credit: NASA, ESA.

Wow is that a beautiful photo.

Wow indeed! I will never get tired of being amazed by the beauty of the Universe!

This image of the Crab Nebula (M1) is one of the best known Hubble Space Telescope images.

But get a load of this! It's a "21st century view" of the Crab Nebula. It takes data from different telescopes using different wavelengths of light and turns it all into a picture we can see. From space, NASA's Chandra provided X-ray data and ESA's XMM-Newton ultraviolet. Hubble supplied data in the visible range and NASA's Spitzer the infrared. This is shown in purple, blue, green and yellow. The Very Large Array (VLA) is a ground-based radio telescope and we see its data in red.

Wow!

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Dubner (IAFE, CONICET-University of Buenos Aires) et al.;
A. Loll et al.; T. Temim et al.; F. Seward et al.; VLA/NRAO/AUI/NSF; Chandra/CXC;
Spitzer/JPL-Caltech; XMM-Newton/ESA; Hubble/STScI

Two fantastic pictures!