November 21, 2014
Light takes eight minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth. It took the universe 13.8 billion years to make you.
M1: The Crab Nebula
Birthday · November 21, 2014
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APOD published November 21, 2014. Credit: Martin Pugh. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
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, ground-based telescopic view uses narrowband data to track emission from ionized oxygen and hydrogen atoms (in blue and red) and explore the tangled filaments within the still expanding cloud. 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 constellation Taurus.
Image credit: Martin Pugh