Opis

This is the HOO version of the dataset. Quality is very nice and many details can be seen in the nebula.

Messier 1 / Crab Nebula is a supernova remnant and a plerion (pulsar wind nebula) located in the Taurus constellation, at 6.500 light-years away. The name was given by William Parsons in 1842, who described it as a “crab with strong defined arms”. The nebula itself was discovered in 1731 by John Bevis and it corresponds to a bright supernova recorded by Chinese astronomers in 1054. Charles Messier catalogued it in 1758, while he was actually looking for Halley’s comet. Messier then proceeded in constructing his well-known catalogue of celestial objects which are cloudy in nature, similar to comets, but which are fixed in the night sky.
The nebula has an actual diameter of 11 light-years and it expands with a speed of 1.500 km/s (0,5% x speed of light). At the center of the nebula lies the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star 30 km in diameter with a spin rate of 30 times/second and which emits radiation in a wide stretch of the EM continuum, from radio waves to gamma rays. The powerful magnetic field of the pulsar concentrates the radiation into narrow beams, which are observed as periodic light flashes. The bolometric luminosity (across all EM spectrum) is 75.000 times bigger than the Sun’s. The stellar progenitor is estimated to have had 9-11 solar masses, but there are inconsistencies between this estimate and the current total mass of the nebula, which is far less than that.
The darker filaments are remnants of the stellar atmosphere and consist mostly of ionized helium and hydrogen, along with carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, neon and sulfur. Their temperature is between 11-18.000 K. The density differences between the filaments and the rest of the nebulosity creates Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities, which create the intricate patterns in the nebula. The total mass of the nebula is 4.6 times that of the Sun, from which almost 50% is allocated to the pulsar.

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