The Crab Pulsar was born with supernova explosion which was widely observed on Earth in the year 1054. The Crab Nebula is located 6,500-light-years away from us in the direction of Constellation Taurus. Here, in this article, we will present this amazing object, once thought to be the most energetic light in universe.
A brief history of stars When a massive star, with a mass several times that of the Sun, reaches the end of its life, it compresses and explodes as supernova, leaving behind a good-looking corpse, a neutron star. Neutron stars are the smallest and densest stars known to exist in the Universe.
They are only a few miles across, with a large fraction of the star’s original mass, composed almost entirely of neutrons — subatomic particles with no net electrical charge. Neutron star is very hot and spins spectacularly fast on its axis emitting beams of electromagnetic radiation that are detected as pulsar.
Neutron star is the densest object astronomers can observe directly; They are tiny objects but have a mass with a large fraction of the star’s original mass ©NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Scientists estimate the crab pulsar’ mass to that of 1.5 solar masses, it’s so dense that one pin of this will weigh thousands maybe million of tons. Two beam of lights, energy and radiation, spinning 30 time per second power the huge cloud of dust, the crab nebula.
There’s so much radiations there, more even on the Sun, that’s could easily be considered one of the deadliest things in the universe.
X-ray images of the crab nebula with toroidal structures ©NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Crab Nebula in Multiple Wavelengths ©Wikipedia.
The Crab Pulsar
In Jan 2016 MAGIC, a ground-based gamma-ray instrument located on the Canary island of La Palma, Spain, discovered unexpected very energetic photons, the most energetic pulsed emission radiation ever detected to date coming from the center of the supernova of 1054 A.D., the Crab pulsar.
We performed deep observation of the Crab pulsar with MAGIC to understand this phenomenon, expecting to measure the maximum energy of the pulsating photons
Roberta Zanin from (ICCUB-IEEC, Barcelona) continues:
The new observations extend this tail to much higher, above TeV energies, that is, several times more energetic than the previous measurement, violating all the theory models believed to be at work in neutron stars.
Crab pulsar ©astro.uu.nl/~jleeuwen. Larger and jumbo mosaic ©Hubble legacy. Crab Pulsar Field Signature ©Youtube. Crab Nebula (Messier 1) ©Arizona State University. Pulsar Crab nebula pulsar time lapsed ©imgmob. Crab Nebula contains the Crab Pulsar ©EliteD. Antimatter Positron Jets in Crab Nebula Pulsar ©electricgalaxy.
This is another very important result achieved by MAGIC on the puzzling celestial object, which incidentally besides the Sun is the most investigated one in all energy ranges,
said Razmik Mirzoyan from the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich.
Hence from the beginning of operation of the MAGIC experiment in 2004, we have been intensively observing the Crab Nebula and the Crab pulsar. And that has really paid-off- in the mean time we revealed significant features of this enigmatic object thus providing substantial input to our theory colleagues- now it is their move to explain how the things are at work. MAGIC has been designed to be the most suitable instrument among imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes to perform this kind of observations.
Crab Nebula ©Epic. Crab Nebula ©Epic. Crab Nebula ©Epic. Crab Nebula.
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