The Incredible Expanding Crab
The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first on
Charles Messier's
famous list of things which are not comets.
In fact, the Crab is
now known to be a supernova remnant, an expanding
cloud of debris from the explosion of a massive star.
The violent birth of the Crab was
witnessed
by astronomers in the year 1054.
Roughly 10 light-years across today, the nebula is still expanding
at a rate of over 1,000 kilometers per second.
Flipping between two images made nearly 30 years apart, this
animation clearly demonstrates the expansion.
The smaller Crab was recorded as a
photographic image made in 1973
using the Kitt Peak
National Observatory 4-meter telescope in 1973.
The
expanded Crab was made this year with the Kitt Peak
Visitor Center's
0.4-meter telescope and digital camera.
Background stars were used to register the two images.