October 26, 2006
The elements that make you — the calcium in your bones, the oxygen in your lungs — were scattered across space by dying stars long before...
Composite Crab
Birthday · October 26, 2006
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APOD published October 26, 2006. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. 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 list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, expanding debris from the death explosion of a massive star. This intriguing false-color image combines data from space-based observatories, Chandra, Hubble, and Spitzer, to explore the debris cloud in x-rays (blue-purple), optical (green), and infrared (red) light. One of the most exotic objects known to modern astronomers, the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star spinning 30 times a second, is the bright spot near picture 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 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.