Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Taurus (Tau)  ·  Contains:  Crab nebula  ·  M 1  ·  NGC 1952  ·  Sh2-244
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Neutron Star CM Tauri in the Crab Nebula, Nico Augustin
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Neutron Star CM Tauri in the Crab Nebula

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Neutron Star CM Tauri in the Crab Nebula, Nico Augustin
Powered byPixInsight

Neutron Star CM Tauri in the Crab Nebula

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I photographed a neutron star! The most extreme thing that’s not a black hole 🤩

Oh, and around it you see the Crab Nebula 🦀

The tiny star in the center of M1 (the lower one of the star pair in the center), is the so-called Crab-Pulsar (CM Tauri or PSR B0531+21), a neutron star that rotates 30 times per second and somehow survived the supernova of its precursor star that created the nebula around. It was 4x brighter than Venus and noticed around the world only 967 years ago!

It's a pretty cool image because there’s only a few neutron stars aka pulsars that are observable in visible light and if you think about it as a bright shining atomic nucleus of the size of a small city that's on the edge to a black hole... well in my opinion that's quite mind blowing 😀

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Neutron Star CM Tauri in the Crab Nebula, Nico Augustin