Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of Crab Nebula, which is said to be home to a pulsar that appears to blink 30 times per second. Here is what NASA explains.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured lots of images that have something new to reveal. The telescope has also captured an image of Crab Nebula, home to a pulsar that appears to blink at a pulse 30 times per second. It can be known that pulsars are collapsed, rapidly spinning cores of stars that appear to blink. Also, pulsars were first discovered 55 years ago. Informing about the same, Hubble tweeted, “55 years ago, pulsars were first discovered! Pulsars are the collapsed, rapidly spinning cores of stars that appear to “blink” or pulse. This Hubble image shows the Crab Nebula, home to a pulsar that appears to pulse 30 times per second.”
According to the information provided by NASA, in 1054, Chinese astronomers took notice of a “guest star” that was, for nearly a month, visible in the daytime sky. The “guest star” they observed was actually a supernova explosion, which gave rise to the Crab Nebula, a six-light-year-wide remnant of the violent event. With an apparent magnitude of 8.4 and located 6,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus, the Crab Nebula can be spotted with a small telescope and is best observed in January.
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“The nebula was discovered by English astronomer John Bevis in 1731, and later observed by Charles Messier who mistook it for Halley’s Comet. Messier’s observation of the nebula inspired him to create a catalog of celestial objects that might be mistaken for comets,” NASA said in a report.
This large mosaic of the Crab Nebula was assembled from 24 individual exposures captured by Hubble over three months. “The colors in this image do not match exactly what we would see with our eyes but yield insight into the composition of this spectacular stellar corpse. The orange filaments are the tattered remains of the star and consist mostly of hydrogen. The blue in the filaments in the outer part of the nebula represents neutral oxygen. Green is singly ionized sulfur, and red indicates doubly ionized oxygen. These elements were expelled during the supernova explosion,” NASA informed.
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A rapidly spinning neutron star (the ultra-dense core of the exploded star) is embedded in the center of the Crab Nebula. Electrons whirling at nearly the speed of light around the star’s magnetic field lines produce the eerie blue light in the interior of the nebula. The neutron star, like a lighthouse, ejects twin beams of radiation that make it appear to pulse 30 times per second as it rotates, it added.
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