M1 (or the Crab Nebula, as it was called by William Parsons in the early 1840s) is the remnant of a supernova.
7400 years ago, give or take a year or two, a star with a mass around 10 times that of our sun exploded near the extreme tip of the southern horn of Taurus. After a journey of 6300 years, the light reached the Earth and, in July 1054 AD, Chinese astronomers described the appearance of a "very bright guest star... visible even during the day like Venus in the morning" in that region of the sky. This host star was also described by Arab astronomers and is believed to have been depicted in the cave paintings of Native tribes in North America and Mexico.
The Crab Nebula, the nebula originating from the stellar material expelled by the explosion, was observed for the first time in 1731 AD and was the first astronomical object recognized in connection with the explosion of a supernova and the first object inserted by Charles Messier into its catalog with the code M1. The Crab Nebula is made up of filaments, which are nothing other than the remains of the atmosphere of the progenitor star, made up mainly of ionized helium and hydrogen, accompanied by heavier atoms, such as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, chromium, manganese, cobalt, nickel, neon and sulphur, generated by the progenitor star during its life and forged by its catastrophic death. At the center of M1 is a pulsar formed following the explosion of the progenitor star, whose strong magnetic field is responsible for the expansion of its filaments at a speed of about 1500 km/s and the consequent diffusion of the stellar material it contains. In this way the stellar material, forged and hurled into the cosmos by the catastrophic explosion, is returned to space and enriches the clouds of interstellar gas and dust which will subsequently give rise to the matter of new stars, planets and galaxies. This is how, as Carl Sagan said, "The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood and the carbon in our apple pie" was formed. As well as the hair of our cat dozing on the sofa, the sofa itself and the screen on which you are reading this story. The billions of billions of atoms that compose them are dust from stars that lived millions of years ago that traveled hundreds of thousands of light years and finally came together, compressed by its own gravity.