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The Crab Nebula (catalogue designations M1, NGC 1952, Taurus A) is a supernova remnant and pulsar wind nebula in the constellation of Taurus. The common name comes from a drawing that somewhat resembled a crab with arms produced by William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse , in 1842 or 1843 using a 36-inch (91 cm) telescope . [ 6 ]
Thomas Gold has shown that the pulsar's spin-down power is sufficient to power the Crab Nebula. A subsequent study by them, including William D. Brundage, also found that the NP 0532 source is located at the Crab Nebula. [20] A radio source was also reported coincident with the Crab Nebula in late 1968 by L. I. Matveenko in Soviet Astronomy. [21]
The Crab pulsar 33-millisecond pulse period was too short to be consistent with other proposed models for pulsar emission. Moreover, the Crab pulsar is so named because it is located at the center of the Crab Nebula, consistent with the 1933 prediction of Baade and Zwicky. [23]
It spins at a rate of 30 times per second, spewing energy beams and taking on a decidedly pulsating appearance.
The Crab Nebula, and the Crab Pulsar within it, is an intense space X-ray source. It is used as a standard candle in the calibration procedure of X-ray instruments in space. However, because of the Crab Nebula's variable intensity at different X-ray energies, conversion of the Crab to another units depends on the X-ray energy range of interest.
A pulsar wind nebula (PWN, plural PWNe), sometimes called a plerion (derived from the Greek "πλήρης", pleres, meaning "full"), [1] is a type of nebula sometimes found inside the shell of a supernova remnant (SNR), powered by winds generated by a central pulsar.
RT instability fingers evident in the Crab Nebula. The Rayleigh–Taylor instability, or RT instability (after Lord Rayleigh and G. I. Taylor), is an instability of an interface between two fluids of different densities which occurs when the lighter fluid is pushing the heavier fluid.
The Crab Nebula was identified as the supernova remnant of SN 1054 between 1921 and 1942, at first speculatively (1920s), with some plausibility by 1939, and beyond reasonable doubt by Jan Oort in 1942. In 1921, Carl Otto Lampland was the first to announce that he had seen changes in the structure of the Crab Nebula. [4]