WATCH: The EXPANSION OF THE CRAB NEBULA. Mind-Warp ++

I think we all folks around this here parts know of the Crab Nebula. What we may not know (and I didn’t, but that isn’t saying much) is that the said Crab Nebula is expanding quicker than a motherfucker. Photographer and part-time wizard Adam Black has put together a video that underlines this expansion. It’s pretty pretty.

Holy. Wow. That’s not a trick using exposures or magnification or anything like that. Keep your eyes on the stars and you’ll see they are in the same positions in both frames; then pick a knot or filament in the nebula and you can see the material moving. To me it looks like a heart beating, especially given the gas cloud’s overall shape.

I’ve written about this visible expansion before; in fact a few years back when I was developing educational activities based on NASA satellites, I reworked an old classroom exercise where you could compare two images of the Crab and determine not only how fast it’s expanding, but then trace it back to determine how old it is. Astonishingly, you get the correct date to within a small margin of error!

It’s easy to think of the sky as static, unmoving, and unchanging. Because most objects are so terribly far away, we don’t notice the motion they undergo. But sometimes they move rapidly enough, and our technology is sensitive enough, that their velocity betrays them. And seeing that motion, as in the video, gives you a real sense of it. Remember, what you’re seeing is a superheated cloud of gas with five times the mass of the Sun screaming outward into space at speeds up to 1500 kilometers per second—well over three million miles per hour!

The Universe is an amazing place. I love that we have such a wonderful chance to study it.

[Bad Astronomy]