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Watch the Crab Nebula Expand Over a 13 Year Period
The Bad Astronomer writes "A thousand years ago, the light from the explosion of a massive star reached the Earth. We now call this supernova remnant the Crab Nebula, and a new image of the Crab taken by astronomer Adam Block shows the physical expansion of the debris, made obvious in a short video comparing his 2012 observations with some taken in 1999. The outward motion of filaments and knots in the material can be easily traced even over this relatively short time baseline."
LAME!!! just 2 exposures alternating back and forth.
Craaaaaaab people! Craaaaaaaab people! Craaaaaab people!
The newer one picks up more of the blue, so it looks larger. If you watch the red, it is definitely moving outward. Will have to use this the next time I teach about nebula.
2.43759728 × 10^-9 FPS should be enough for anybody.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
that gives we Ents a headache, please slow it down
Plus the biggest changes seem to be in the colors not the growth which might be related to the fact it was taken by two different telescopes....
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
The Crab Nebula exploded in 1054; well, 6500 years earlier, to be pedantic. But the light arrived to Earth in 1054. So what else happened in 1054? Oh yeah, the great Schism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism#Mutual_excommunication_of_1054).
Funny coincidence...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The second "larger" image was processed differently - more lightening of the dark end & over exposed. All the stars bloom in the new image as they've been enhanced stronger than the older image. Granted the internal filaments did move slightly, there is cheating to make it look more pronounced.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
Cool guys don't look at explosions.
We should all take this time to remember the brave folks who, thousands of years ago, had to self destruct their crab-class starship to save the universe from the Daleks.
This was first done in 1921
http://www.pnas.org/content/7/6/179.full.pdf+html
True, they didn't have animated gifs back then...
Ignore the parts that are differently visible and the color differences, and focus on the parts that are the same in both images.
You'll see that the elements from the earlier photo have moved away from the center of the nebula and this is visible relative to all the background stars.
G.
be glad they didn't make a 10 hours youtube loop
Or real-time.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
many features near the edge have not moved at all. It leads me to
think that in the later exposure, you are simply seeing details
that were not previously visible.
be glad they didn't make a 10 hours youtube loop
Yeah, I've seen those in search results frequently... who does that and what ever for?!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKJRPPA6NBQ
4 teh lulz. . . or something
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Anyone figure out how fast the "debris" is moving from the center? To see this kind of a change, on this scale, in such a short time, it must be mind-blowing fast!
neorush
Off topic but I really am annoyed with the hack web "programmers" that build web sites with a dozen or more cross site scripts. Here's the shit list from this latest atrocity:
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That's 21 external javascript sites. There are probably more that would be pulled in if I enabled all these sites in NoScript. This is seriously pathetic.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
This is what I thought of, basically the newer telescope probably has updated optics and can take a finer grain of image, of course it will show more and seem like it has grown bigger.
Why the misinformation?! The background stars don't move, the nebula expands, the color is irrelevant. Watch it in black and white if you must.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I have heard it suggested that when Messier was compiling his list of things not to look at because they're not comets, the Crab Nebula was prominently in his list because it was significantly smaller and brighter in his day than it is now. It's far from conspicuous today...
...laura
I've also expanded over a 13 year period.
Table-ized A.I.
There are more comments bitching about the link than comments about the actual nebula. Even the nerds are disinterested in space these days...
I'm overwhelmed with regret that they did not, indeed, take a picture every week like I expected, or even every year.
Two pictures. And they made a VIDEO. For two pictures.
Seriously?
No. Firstly the colours are simply mapping different emissions to different wavelengths. The reddish picture is what it really looks like with the red being mostly Hydrogen Alpha and in part Ionised Sulphur emissions (both infrared). The yellowish picture maps Hydrogen Alpha to the green channel and Sulphur II to the red channel (result is yellow / brown). In either case the blue remains Ozone emissions. This has been labelled the Hubble Palette as that's how pictures came from the Hubble so you could separate the amount of Ha and SII in each nebula rather than mushing them all into red.
But really note that the stars don't move, however the actual details like the shock fronts visible in the detail actually seem to move out from the centre. The colour, camera quality, and even exposure is really irrelevant. You could have seen the same result on a well calibrated backyard telescope and a DSLR if someone was looking.
It does in this case. Red in the normal sense is Hydrogen Alpha and Ionised Sulphur when picked up on a colour camera. When narrow band imaging and mapping the emissions to the Hubble palette Hydrogen Alpha becomes green and Ionised Sulphur stays mapped to red. The result is that the red in the second picture is the same emissions as the yellow/brownish colours in the first pictures, and they clearly show expansion.
The colour has nothing to do with being two different scopes. It's to do with two different ways of mapping data. The reddish picture is what the nebula looks like on a colour camera. Ha and SII emissions from nebula are infrared and cameras map them to red. When doing narrow band imaging if you want to separate these emissions you can do it quite well the way Hubble did and map Ha to the green channel and SII to red.
This means the yellow in the first picture is the same emission as the red in the second picture, and take a look at the shock fronts in both frames and note that they have moved outward from the centre.
Hubble: Timelapse of V838 Monocerotis (2002-2006) [1080p]
"The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has been observing the V838 Mon light echo since 2002. Each new observation of the light echo reveals a new and unique "thin-section" through the interstellar dust around the star. This video morphs images of the light echo from the Hubble taken at multiple times between 2002 and 2006. The numerous whorls and eddies in the interstellar dust are particularly noticeable. Possibly they have been produced by the effects of magnetic fields in the space between the stars." (apologies if this is a re-post)
It's more like "Crap Nebula", duh!
So say we all