Crab Nebula (IMAGE)

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Crab Nebula

Caption

The Crab Nebula, the six-light-year-wide expanding cloud of debris from a supernova explosion, hosts a neutron star spinning 30 times a second that is among the brightest pulsars in the sky at X-ray and radio wavelengths. This composite of Hubble Space Telescope images reveals different gases expelled in the explosion: blue reveals neutral oxygen, green shows singly ionized sulfur, and red indicates doubly ionized oxygen.

Credit

Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)

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