Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of
our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief
explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2006 October
26 Explanation: 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 constellati