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The crab nebula has always fascinated astronomers.
Since its launch nearly two years ago, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made detailed observations of the most distant stars in the Universe. It offered deepest look of the cosmos ever captured. And now, it has presented the crab nebula, located 6,500 light years away from Earth, in a new light. The never-before-seen details have been posted by American space agency NASA on its website. Astronomers have always been fascinated by Crab Nebula’s “beating heart” – an inner region that sends out pulses of radiation and tsunamis of charged particles.
The remnant of a supernova explosion is situated in Taurus constellation.
The detailed image has been captured by space telescope’s NIRCam (near-infrared camera) and MIRI (mid-infrared instrument), and a team from Princeton University researchers is studying them to find out about the nebula’s origins.
“Webb’s sensitivity and spatial resolution allow us to accurately determine the composition of the ejected material, particularly the content of iron and nickel, which may reveal what type of explosion produced the Crab Nebula,” the university’s Tea Temim is quoted as saying by NASA.
The nebula’s inner workings are seen in greater detail in the image shot by JWST. It shows synchrotron radiation: Emission produced from charged particles, like electrons, moving around magnetic field lines at relativistic speeds.
The image on NASA’s website shows a crisp, cage-like structure of fluffy gaseous filaments in red-orange. The central region is also shown in great detail – yellow-white and green emission from dust grains.
Crab nebula was created when a supermassive star exploded about 1,000 years ago, sending its blazing hot parts into space. But the dense core of that star remained intact and is the Crab Pulsar that lives at the centre of the nebula today.