HEIC0515: FOR RELEASE 10:00 (CET)/4:00 AM EST 1 December, 2005
http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/html/heic0515.html

Photo release:
Most detailed image of the Crab Nebula

1-December-2005 A new Hubble image - among the largest ever produced 
with the Earth-orbiting observatory - gives the most detailed view so 
far of the entire Crab Nebula. The Crab is arguably the single most 
interesting object, as well as one of the most studied, in all of 
astronomy. The image is the largest ever taken with Hubble’s WFPC2 
workhorse camera.

The Crab Nebula is one of the most intricately structured and dynamic 
objects ever observed. The new Hubble image of the Crab was assembled 
from 24 individual exposures taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space 
Telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WPFC2) and is the 
highest resolution image of the entire Crab Nebula ever made. 

The Crab Nebula is a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star’s 
supernova explosion. Japanese and Chinese astronomers witnessed this 
violent event nearly 1,000 years ago in 1054. 

The filaments are the tattered remains of the star and consist mostly 
of hydrogen. The rapidly spinning neutron star embedded in the centre 
of the nebula, only barely visible in this Hubble image, is the dynamo 
powering the nebula’s eerie interior bluish glow. The blue light comes 
from electrons whirling at nearly the speed of light around magnetic 
field lines from the neutron star. The neutron star, like a lighthouse, 
ejects twin beams of radiation that appear to pulse 30 times a second 
due to the neutron star's rotation. A neutron star is the crushed 
ultra-dense core of the exploded star.

The Crab Nebula derived its name from its appearance in a drawing made 
by Irish astronomer Lord Rosse in 1844, using a 36-inch telescope. 
When viewed by Hubble, as well as large ground-based telescopes such as 
ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the Crab Nebula takes on a more detailed 
appearance that yields clues into the spectacular demise of a star, 
6,500 light-years away. 

The newly composed image was assembled from individual Wide Field and 
Planetary Camera 2 exposures taken in October 1999, January 2000, and 
December 2000. The colours in the image indicate the different elements 
that were expelled during the explosion. Blue indicates neutral oxygen, 
green singly ionised sulphur and red doubly-ionised oxygen. The Hubble 
data have been superimposed onto images taken with the European 
Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory, 
Chile.

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Notes for editors
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation 
between ESA and NASA.

Image credit: NASA, ESA and Jeff Hester (Arizona State University)
Acknowledgement: Davide de Martin (www.skyfactory.org)

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For more information, please contact:

Jesper Sollerman
Dark Cosmology Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark
Tel: +45-35-32-59-68
E-mail: jesper@astro.ku.dk

Jeff Hester 
Arizona State University, Tempe, USA 
Tel: +1-480-965-0741
E-mail: jhester@asu.edu

Lars Lindberg Christensen
Hubble/ESA, Garching, Germany
Tel: +49-(0)89-3200-6306
Cellular: +49-(0)173-3872-621
E-mail: lars@eso.org

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, USA
Tel: +1-410-338-4514
villard@stsci.edu