- NASA’s James Webb Telescope has captured never-before-seen details of the Crab Nebula.
- The new image reveals ghostly tendrils and the dense core of an exploded star in exquisite detail.
- The Crab Nebula is the remains of an exploded star and is located 6,500 light years away.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured new views of a stunning nebula, revealing never-before-seen details.
A nebula is a cloud of gas and dust often formed from the debris of dying or exploding stars. These clouds are also cradles of new stars, with the gas and dust providing the building blocks for stellar formation.
Astronomers estimate there are tens of thousands of nebulae in the Milky Way galaxy, alone, and JWST recently turned its sights to one nearby: the Crab Nebula, located about 6,500 light-years away.
Studying the Crab Nebula in incredible detail
On Monday, NASA released a new image of the Crab Nebula, clearly showing a small white dot at its center. It’s the heart of the Crab Nebula, called the Crab Pulsar.
About 1,000 years ago, a supermassive star went supernova and exploded, spewing its blazing hot guts into space. But the dense core of that star remained intact and is the Crab Pulsar that lives at the center of the nebula today.
A pulsar is a rapidly rotating object that, in the case of the Crab Nebula, supercharges the gaseous material around it that JWST has revealed in stunning detail for the first time — something the Hubble Space Telescope could not show when it turned its sights on the Crab in 2005.
JWST reveals new features in the Crab Nebula
Hubble observes space mostly in the same type of light that we see — visible light. Therefore, Hubble was not capable of capturing the hazy, ghost-like, thin white wisps of charged particles seen by JWST, which recently viewed the nebula in infrared light.
