The Crab Nebula (And Its Enigmatic Eruption) The nebula set against a full-sky gamma ray map, showing the Crab Nebula's location in the crosshairs. NASA Something strange is afoot in the Crab Nebula. Famous for beaming a steady dose of radiation at Earth at regular intervals thanks to the spinning neutron star at its center, the nebula has long been of interest to astronomers. So one can imagine their interest when an enormous gamma-ray flare five times more powerful than any previously detected burst from the region, making these "the highest-energy electrons known to be associated with any cosmic source," according to NASA.
The Crab Nebula is basically the remnants of a supernova located about 6,500 light years away (in Taurus, for those of you keeping tabs on the heavens at home). What was once the star’s core is now an expanding gas cloud anchored by a superdense neutron star that rotates 30 times per second, each time swinging a beam of intense radiation toward the Earth.
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Strongest X-Ray Burst Ever Seen Bombards NASA's Swift Observatory, Temporarily Blinding ItTagsTechnology, Clay Dillow, crab nebula, Fermi space telescope, gamma-ray bursts, gamma-rays, SpaceThat’s been going on, from our perspective here, for thousands of years. And it’s been doing so with regularity, 30 times per second, ceaselessly. A handful of short-lived gamma-ray flares have been detected over the years, but nothing that fell outside the range of what’s considered normal cosmic violence.
Then, on April 12, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope--and later Italy’s AGILE satellite--picked up this monster of a flare 30 times more intense than the nebula’s normal energy output and five times more powerful than any previous uptick in energy. Four days later an even brighter flare erupted. Then, two days after that, the strange activity ceased without explanation.
Astronomers theorize that the flares must be coming from somewhere within a one-third of-a-light-year radius of that central neutron star, and that the area doing the emitting must be close to the size of our own solar system. And to offer some perspective on the energy unleashed, the electrons in these emissions must have energies some 100 times greater than the highest achievable energies in the LHC.
But what caused them is still unknown. The prevailing theory seems to be that the magnetic field around the neutron star suddenly rearranged itself, accelerating particles quickly to nearly the speed of light. As high speed electrons interact with the shifting magnetic field, gamma-rays are produced. Observations are ongoing. In the meantime, it gives us an excuse to post brilliantly pretty images of the Crab Nebula, like the one above.
[NASA]
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diogogmiranda 05/12/11 at 7:25 pm Wait, let me understand something here. If the Crab Nebula is 6,500 light years away from here, it means that the light traveling from there takes 6,500 years to get here.
So that happened 6,500 years ago, tight?
If so, how come they're talking in the present? And how long does it take for the radiation to travel compared to the light?
Thanks
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yeahilikescience 05/13/11 at 12:28 am Radiation and light travel at the same speed because visible light is just a form of radiation, the only part of the electromagnetic spectrum that our eyes can detect due to our photoreceptors.
Could it possibly be that something with considerable mass collided with the neutron star, causing a great release of energy because of the star's immense gravity? After all, something approximate to a marshmallow colliding with a neutron star releases about the equivalent energy to an atomic bomb.
Link to this comment yeahilikescience 05/13/11 at 12:30 am And they're talking in the present because technically speaking, due to space time relativity, all time is now. And because although it happened 6500 years ago 6500 light years away, it is occurring for us to observe now.
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OtakuElite 05/14/11 at 1:48 am What I'm confused about is that the increase in energy means that the rotation of the gas cloud temporarily increased, and "... the magnetic field around the neutron star suddenly rearranged itself, accelerating particles quickly to nearly the speed of light."
So my question is, wouldn't those bursts of increased energy be moving faster than the other pulses, moving out of sequence with the other 30 times per second bursts we can witness here? The statement about nearly the speed of light just leads me to believe it is moving faster then the previous pulses.
Link to this comment JediMindset 05/14/11 at 11:59 amwow. maybe this has something to do with 2012. its all falling into place. and real science is proving it.
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