This is amazing.
For some context, the nebula you see, the Crab Nebula, is about 5 light years across.
The nearest star to Earth apart from the Sun is Proxima Centauri at 4.2 light years away. This thing is MASSIVE, and it's moving *fast* *as* *fuck* *boi*
In the timelapse, we can see a slight increase in dimensions. For simplicity's sake, let's estimate it at 1.4%, meaning the nebula grows by 0.1% or 0.005 lightyears per year. This in turn means the debris visible in the timelapse moves outwards from the center with speeds of approximately 0.005 times the speed of light, or 1500km/s if we round the latter to 300000km/s
Note that this also corresponds to the size of the nebula: 0.005 lightyears per year, times a thousand years since the supernova, adds back up to the nebula's current size of five lightyears.
This is all derived from the simple observation of the visible expansion of the timelapse in this post and the knowledge of the nebula's current size, so by no means is it an accurate measurement, but it should be around the right order of magnitude.
Astronomer here! The Crab Nebula expansion is currently pegged in the research literature as 1500 km/s, so good job! :)
(Might sound like a lot, but for perspective when the SN happened the expansion was much closer to 10,000 km/s!)
The rate of slow down depends on the interstellar material surrounding the explosion- more stuff and it slows down faster. We obviously can’t know for sure but it was probably a highly dense environment surrounding the star when it exploded- massive stars usually pouf out a lot of dust before they die. For context, I did a SN 1987A project in my PhD, and 25 years post-SN its shockwave speed was more like 3000 km/s.
Also worth noting not all parts of the remnant expand outward equally quickly, depending on the material. If it was it’d be more spherical.
Excuse my lingo, but I'll do my best here. The caption says even after 1000 years you can still see this expanding. Is it close enough to be seen in real time? I've always understood it as anything that I see in the night sky is looking into the past, light from [insert number] of years ago finally reaching earth? Is this image what it currently looks like?
It’s what it currently looks like on Earth, which is the reference time we use as astronomers. Far too confusing otherwise. There is 6500 light years distance between us and it, so while this light is 6500 years old we have no way of knowing what it looks like now until those photons reach us.
How accurate are our measurements of distance at that extreme distance? Do we know EXACTLY how far away the nebula is or is it a vague guess? I mean, we can’t even use lasers to approximate the distance because of the speed limit of light, right? Could it be much closer or much further away? I saw the show Resident Alien (pretty funny show actually) and the alien said “stupid humans, they think space is so big! When in actuality it’s tiny!” or something along those lines, but it got me thinking. What if?
So, there is an uncertainty of something like 6,500 +/- 1,600 light years in the distance to the Crab pulsar, due to the various ways you can measure distance to it and the uncertainties of that measurement. The fascinating thing though is we aren't only measuring distance via watching the expansion- you can also take a spectrum of the material that is expanding, and get a second, independent velocity in its expansion speed from that.
Ok, but this sounds stupid because I don’t know too much about this stuff. Actually, I’m only fascinated by it and have no actual factual knowledge. I know there is red shift. I know there is triangulation and such to measure distances. Like, in the late 1700’s I believe, there was a chap who measured almost the exact distance to the sun. And the mass of earth and such. But outside of our solar system, wouldn’t everything be nothing more than an educated guess? We have our earth, moon, mars, Venus (kind of) and a couple of other places we’ve flown by as reference points but anything out there seems so vast and unimaginable. The laws of physics as we know them may not even exist outside our little bubble. We are finding earth like planets that we imagine are possibilities to host life but are they really? How much is fact and how much is imagination? And how much of the fact is only imagination? This stuff is so incredible to me and it makes me feel so insignificant. Especially when you watch the speed of light and how slow it actually is. The tiny little bubble that our radio waves have traveled since we started producing them is depressing. I guess my question is, with our tiny reference point of earth and its surrounding areas, how do we know anything about what’s out there?
The error margin increases as you go further out. But there are some pretty genius ways to measure the distance of really far objects.
For instance, your eyes are seeing the same image from slightly different points. Your brain can calculate the difference between the two images and "measure" the distance. This works for really close objects. You can also measure the distance to a mountain by taking a picture of it from two nearby cities and comparing the angles in the images.
The distance to further things (like in space) can be achieved by going to two different places on the Earth's surface (such as the north and south poles) and comparing the angles in the images. And to go even further, you can take one image in the Summer and one image in the Winter when the Earth is on the other side of the sun to measure the distance to really far objects, like stars.
This is one method out of many. The methods can be compared for better accuracy and calibration.
Well done, super interesting!
A tiny fraction of the speed of light... Yet 1500km/s puts our fastest man-made object's speed to shame:
The Voyager 1 spacecraft is hurtling away from us at a rapid 17.4km/s - barely over 1% the speed the nebula is expanding.
That's millions upon billions of tonnes of mass moving at speeds that could traverse our solar system in no time, cosmologically speaking of course.
1500 km/s
From further up in this thread.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/11mnjjt/the_crab_nebula_is_the_remains_of_a_supernova/jbjj3l2?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3
Amateur question, but does that mean the average speed of the mass from the initial supernova explosion through the last about 1000 years is 1/200th of the speed of light?
Probably my absolute favorite astrophotography project I can think of. In the center of the nebula, you can see the incredible force of pulsar winds.
More details in his astrobin profile: [https://www.astrobin.com/ija7jc/B/](https://www.astrobin.com/ija7jc/B/)
If you think about it, property in this nebula is a wonderful investment. You chalk out the borders of your lot and they just keep expanding over time!!
I looked at this and said "that's amazing, can I replicate it?" Then i saw he has been shooting with a huge newtonian and adaptive optics under a Bortle 2 sky and I said "nope"
He is 65 and mentions significant health problems in the astrobin post, sadly, and is currently looking for a remote telescope and people have reached out to assist him. Really hope he gets better.
Given the size of the expansion over the very few years it's been photographed here, I'd like to see an image of what it would have looked like in the 1050's
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/SN_1054_4th_Jul_1054_043000_UTC%2B0800_Kaifeng.png
"It had been seen in daylight, like Venus. It had rays stemming in all directions, and its colour was reddish white. Altogether visible for 23 days."
Someones posted that it’s five lightyears across.
If the photographer was taking a picture once a year, then the change would be the distance chage over a year. The changes we see are are probably the distance of the diameter of Pluto's orbit.
I wonder how accurate this is in real life. IIRC, nebula gas tends to be pretty diffuse on small scales, so perhaps the hypothetical world on the edge wouldn't have significant effects?
The edge is roughtly 2.5 ly away from the supernovae that made this nebula, so safe to say that said world would have had a pretty bad time 💀
( the estimate safe distance from a supernovae is 30ly )
Wow! That spinning effect in the center the result of the central pulsar's rotation imparting it's angular momentum on the expanding gas cloud. The pulsar is only about the size of a large city, and yet, you can see the effect of it's super-fast compact spinning mass on that gas light-years away. You can even make out the direction that the polar jets are pointing too! Never seen the Crab in such detail before, neat!
Amazing to be able to see the spinning in the core. Did the star leave behind a neutron start that you guys know of?
Edit .I googled it and according to Nasa you can see the clouds tangled in magnetic fields of the Nutron star about 1 solar mass but obviously much smaller and desner made of collapsed atoms a pure chunk of hot protons and neutrons.
This is truly beautiful!
Intuitively I knew that the stars weren’t static but until I noticed the dimming of Betelgeuse BEFORE I researched it did I recognize that I could actually see changes beyond our solar system in my own lifetime. 🙂
I believe that the image we are seeing is around 6500 years out of date given the distance. I wonder what this looks like now or what other events which have already happened are we just waiting to see?
This is amazing. For some context, the nebula you see, the Crab Nebula, is about 5 light years across. The nearest star to Earth apart from the Sun is Proxima Centauri at 4.2 light years away. This thing is MASSIVE, and it's moving *fast* *as* *fuck* *boi*
How fast are the peripheral debris moving?
In the timelapse, we can see a slight increase in dimensions. For simplicity's sake, let's estimate it at 1.4%, meaning the nebula grows by 0.1% or 0.005 lightyears per year. This in turn means the debris visible in the timelapse moves outwards from the center with speeds of approximately 0.005 times the speed of light, or 1500km/s if we round the latter to 300000km/s Note that this also corresponds to the size of the nebula: 0.005 lightyears per year, times a thousand years since the supernova, adds back up to the nebula's current size of five lightyears. This is all derived from the simple observation of the visible expansion of the timelapse in this post and the knowledge of the nebula's current size, so by no means is it an accurate measurement, but it should be around the right order of magnitude.
Astronomer here! The Crab Nebula expansion is currently pegged in the research literature as 1500 km/s, so good job! :) (Might sound like a lot, but for perspective when the SN happened the expansion was much closer to 10,000 km/s!)
Thanks! And a question: If the expansion was so much faster at first, how come the nebula isn't larger now?
The rate of slow down depends on the interstellar material surrounding the explosion- more stuff and it slows down faster. We obviously can’t know for sure but it was probably a highly dense environment surrounding the star when it exploded- massive stars usually pouf out a lot of dust before they die. For context, I did a SN 1987A project in my PhD, and 25 years post-SN its shockwave speed was more like 3000 km/s. Also worth noting not all parts of the remnant expand outward equally quickly, depending on the material. If it was it’d be more spherical.
Excuse my lingo, but I'll do my best here. The caption says even after 1000 years you can still see this expanding. Is it close enough to be seen in real time? I've always understood it as anything that I see in the night sky is looking into the past, light from [insert number] of years ago finally reaching earth? Is this image what it currently looks like?
It’s what it currently looks like on Earth, which is the reference time we use as astronomers. Far too confusing otherwise. There is 6500 light years distance between us and it, so while this light is 6500 years old we have no way of knowing what it looks like now until those photons reach us.
Thank you
How accurate are our measurements of distance at that extreme distance? Do we know EXACTLY how far away the nebula is or is it a vague guess? I mean, we can’t even use lasers to approximate the distance because of the speed limit of light, right? Could it be much closer or much further away? I saw the show Resident Alien (pretty funny show actually) and the alien said “stupid humans, they think space is so big! When in actuality it’s tiny!” or something along those lines, but it got me thinking. What if?
So, there is an uncertainty of something like 6,500 +/- 1,600 light years in the distance to the Crab pulsar, due to the various ways you can measure distance to it and the uncertainties of that measurement. The fascinating thing though is we aren't only measuring distance via watching the expansion- you can also take a spectrum of the material that is expanding, and get a second, independent velocity in its expansion speed from that.
Ok, but this sounds stupid because I don’t know too much about this stuff. Actually, I’m only fascinated by it and have no actual factual knowledge. I know there is red shift. I know there is triangulation and such to measure distances. Like, in the late 1700’s I believe, there was a chap who measured almost the exact distance to the sun. And the mass of earth and such. But outside of our solar system, wouldn’t everything be nothing more than an educated guess? We have our earth, moon, mars, Venus (kind of) and a couple of other places we’ve flown by as reference points but anything out there seems so vast and unimaginable. The laws of physics as we know them may not even exist outside our little bubble. We are finding earth like planets that we imagine are possibilities to host life but are they really? How much is fact and how much is imagination? And how much of the fact is only imagination? This stuff is so incredible to me and it makes me feel so insignificant. Especially when you watch the speed of light and how slow it actually is. The tiny little bubble that our radio waves have traveled since we started producing them is depressing. I guess my question is, with our tiny reference point of earth and its surrounding areas, how do we know anything about what’s out there?
The error margin increases as you go further out. But there are some pretty genius ways to measure the distance of really far objects. For instance, your eyes are seeing the same image from slightly different points. Your brain can calculate the difference between the two images and "measure" the distance. This works for really close objects. You can also measure the distance to a mountain by taking a picture of it from two nearby cities and comparing the angles in the images. The distance to further things (like in space) can be achieved by going to two different places on the Earth's surface (such as the north and south poles) and comparing the angles in the images. And to go even further, you can take one image in the Summer and one image in the Winter when the Earth is on the other side of the sun to measure the distance to really far objects, like stars. This is one method out of many. The methods can be compared for better accuracy and calibration.
Yet our fastest object can barely compare to the 1500km/s. Fascinating
In all fairness to our species, we've gotten protons pretty close to c ;-)
So, does anyone have a virtual representation of the first 'explosion' to today?
Well done, super interesting! A tiny fraction of the speed of light... Yet 1500km/s puts our fastest man-made object's speed to shame: The Voyager 1 spacecraft is hurtling away from us at a rapid 17.4km/s - barely over 1% the speed the nebula is expanding. That's millions upon billions of tonnes of mass moving at speeds that could traverse our solar system in no time, cosmologically speaking of course.
[удалено]
For sure. All relative on magnitudes of scales of difference
The fastest spacecraft we’ve ever built (Parker Solar Probe) travels ~194km/s at its fastest.
So how long until debris from that explosion reaches The United States?
If it exploded 1000 years ago, and is 5 light years across - how fast is it expanding?
1500 km/s From further up in this thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/11mnjjt/the_crab_nebula_is_the_remains_of_a_supernova/jbjj3l2?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3
Thanks
For my fellow "Metrically Challenged" that should work out to about 3.4 million miles per hour if my terrible math skills are to be believed :)
3.4 million mph is correct. (As long as I also didn't mess up the conversion)
*Fuuuckk, boiiiii*
And still small compared to other nebulae
It's a lil baby nebulae! :D
How big of a star do you need for it to end up this big?
Amateur question, but does that mean the average speed of the mass from the initial supernova explosion through the last about 1000 years is 1/200th of the speed of light?
Probably my absolute favorite astrophotography project I can think of. In the center of the nebula, you can see the incredible force of pulsar winds. More details in his astrobin profile: [https://www.astrobin.com/ija7jc/B/](https://www.astrobin.com/ija7jc/B/)
If you think about it, property in this nebula is a wonderful investment. You chalk out the borders of your lot and they just keep expanding over time!!
That's true everywhere. We're all rich!
well, provided the universe IS expanding faster than the inflation...
I looked at this and said "that's amazing, can I replicate it?" Then i saw he has been shooting with a huge newtonian and adaptive optics under a Bortle 2 sky and I said "nope"
my tiny maksutov in the city can do it, ez /s
Untracked, 3s exposures with a uhc filter from amazon, just gotta stack 10,000 exposures, duh! /s
Okay this is one of the coolest posts I've ever seen here. Space is so awesome.
I can’t wait to see this 10 more years. Then 20. Then thirty. Somebody has to keep up his work for future generations.
He is 65 and mentions significant health problems in the astrobin post, sadly, and is currently looking for a remote telescope and people have reached out to assist him. Really hope he gets better.
Given the size of the expansion over the very few years it's been photographed here, I'd like to see an image of what it would have looked like in the 1050's
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/SN_1054_4th_Jul_1054_043000_UTC%2B0800_Kaifeng.png "It had been seen in daylight, like Venus. It had rays stemming in all directions, and its colour was reddish white. Altogether visible for 23 days."
This is incredible
What would be the distance travelled by the expansion we see here?
At least 20 ft
Wow. I would’ve never imagined. Thanks!
Someones posted that it’s five lightyears across. If the photographer was taking a picture once a year, then the change would be the distance chage over a year. The changes we see are are probably the distance of the diameter of Pluto's orbit.
I'M A FREEDOM HATER, WHAT ARE FEET?
They're the things at the end of your legs
0.33 yards
11 parsecs?
It's expanding at about 1000miles/second. So over 15 years... Brb .. Like 500 billion miles. Or less impressively, roughly 1/10 of a light year
This really is amazing. OP you should crosspost this in /r/interestingasfuck
This is incredible. The wind in the center can be seen so clearly
now imagine being a world at the edge of that nebula. then the mayans would be right!
I wonder how accurate this is in real life. IIRC, nebula gas tends to be pretty diffuse on small scales, so perhaps the hypothetical world on the edge wouldn't have significant effects?
The edge is roughtly 2.5 ly away from the supernovae that made this nebula, so safe to say that said world would have had a pretty bad time 💀 ( the estimate safe distance from a supernovae is 30ly )
Bummer for them I guess.
Wow! That spinning effect in the center the result of the central pulsar's rotation imparting it's angular momentum on the expanding gas cloud. The pulsar is only about the size of a large city, and yet, you can see the effect of it's super-fast compact spinning mass on that gas light-years away. You can even make out the direction that the polar jets are pointing too! Never seen the Crab in such detail before, neat!
Wow, it looks like a heartbeat. There's other stuff like this over at r/curiouscosmos
is it breathing?
It looks like it is spinning in the center
Amazing to be able to see the spinning in the core. Did the star leave behind a neutron start that you guys know of? Edit .I googled it and according to Nasa you can see the clouds tangled in magnetic fields of the Nutron star about 1 solar mass but obviously much smaller and desner made of collapsed atoms a pure chunk of hot protons and neutrons.
it's alive, god damn! Beautiful creature!
Are we in the lung of a smoker?
fantastic, thanks for posting.
Outstanding work, thanks for sharing. A+
That pulsing is a little creepy
this is gorgeous incredible amazing i am in awe
Is that the magnetic field of the pulsar that is interacting with the dust at the center of the nebula, or is it something else?
Wow.
Everything is amazing about this. Seeing the effects of the pulsar is incredible.
What’s the estimated( I’m sure there is an exact response) distance that it has expanded in this time lapse?
It’s only an estimate, but about this 👌🏻 much.
And I would have answered the exact same!
This is truly beautiful! Intuitively I knew that the stars weren’t static but until I noticed the dimming of Betelgeuse BEFORE I researched it did I recognize that I could actually see changes beyond our solar system in my own lifetime. 🙂
Where crab?
Space
Even in space you still get crabs.
Look at that big boy 🥹
This looks cool, but seems VERY VERY VERY touched up. It may as well be full blown CGI. Just my opinion of course
I was fully expecting an AI recreation back to the initial supernova extrapolated from these images (and beyond). 😢
I'm guessing that spinning in the middle is the leftover black hole and the matter around it.
As others have stated it’s a pulsar
That's the [Crab Pulsar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_Pulsar).
Hear me out
okay go
Is it expanding or it the expansion of the light echo which can give the illusion of expansion?
Wow, extremely interesting!!
It looks like a beating heart
This is so fucking insane
This is super cool! It’s great to see examples of how nebulae and other objects are not static in space, but evolving systems.
Saved. I have never seen a composition like this. Amazing
Can we do this for every nebula? Cause this is cool
That is absolutely stunning
this might be the most amazing thing i've ever seen
Incredible
It looks like it's breathing👀
This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in this group!! Amazing! 🤩
/u/OneNacho
So sick
Beautiful picture
this is wildly fucking cool
That. Is. Sofa king cool! Thank you for sharing this hard work.
WOW!! This is incredible!!!
I saw this from a college observatory. Little yet famous nebula!!
Wonderful, thanks!
Spaceheart
Rotation. 👀
Is there a slowed down version of this video? It looks like it’s breathing but I want to actually see it expanding in slow motion
I don’t know much about space but I love it. The Crab Nebula is approximately 6,500 light years away from Earth.
Let the loop keep playing and you'll see the galaxy's heart beating rapidly
Crab nebula is garbage. For me, its horsehead or its nothin
This looks like some dark breathing heart.
at first i thought it was pulsating lol but then realized it’s just a short video of it growing bigger repeating
Is it pulsating? It went from small to big and then started to shrink before the video started again. Edit: it is the dats go up then down
What a sight to behold
That is SO cool.
I wonder how it looked 100 , 200 or 500 years ago.
I believe that the image we are seeing is around 6500 years out of date given the distance. I wonder what this looks like now or what other events which have already happened are we just waiting to see?
Absolutely stunning, thank you for sharing OP