Starship Asterisk*

M1: The Crab Nebula

Explanation: The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier's famous 18th century list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, debris from the death explosion of a massive star witnessed by astronomers in the year 1054. This sharp image from the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) explores the eerie glow and fragmented strands of the still expanding cloud of interstellar debris in infrared light. One of the most exotic objects known to modern astronomers, the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star spinning 30 times a second, is visible as a bright spot near the nebula's center. Like a cosmic dynamo, this collapsed remnant of the stellar core powers the Crab's emission across the electromagnetic spectrum. Spanning about 12 light-years, the Crab Nebula is a mere 6,500 light-years away in the head-strong constellation Taurus.

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The JWST is just incredible. I look forward to all the future photos of phenomena both familiar and new that it will be blessing us with.

I’ll never get tired of the Crab Nebula and its story… If those Chinese astronomers knew what became of that sudden new "star" in their sky, a twelve light-year wide nebula energized by a mind-boggling tiny object spinning at an insane speed and a table spoon of which weighs a billion tons, Mount Everest sitting in a spoon, with a gravitational pull so strong that an object dropped from only one meter above ground would have time to reach 7 million km/h before hitting it, and the whole thing grows 1500 km larger every second - those astronomers would be flabbergasted! And if we would see what they saw, a star  so bright it could be seen during daytime and you could read by it at night, WE would be flabbergasted! Ain’t that wonderful?

Based on comparisons with other images, I believe this is the location of the Crab Nebula pulsar (red lines and "P near the center), along with some pretty blue stars sprinkled about to keep Ann happy. And is that a background galaxy edge-on (yellow lines and question mark)?

A very powerful nebula with a pulsar!