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The Crab Nebula and Things that Go Kaboom in the Night

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Frank Summers, Space Telescope Science Institute

Massive stars do not go gentle into that good night. They rage against the dying of the light in titanic supernova explosions. These stars, more than 10 times the mass of our sun, exhaust their nuclear fuel in less than 1 percent of the Sun’s lifetime. Their brilliant blasts, in which a single star can outshine an entire galaxy, serve as both galactic recycling engines and cosmic beacons. The stellar remains range from the densest objects in the universe to gossamer gas filaments expanding across interstellar space. In one particular supernova remnant, the Crab Nebula, its 3D nested structure showcases the energetics and interconnections revealed by multiwavelength astronomy.

Recorded live on Tuesday, February 4, 2020, at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.

More information: www.stsci.edu/public-lectures

Cloudy with a Chance of Stars

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Nimisha Kumari, Space Telescope Science Institute

How do stars form? This simple question has intrigued humankind for centuries, and is one of the most explored topics of contemporary astrophysics. Stars form in galaxies, but not all galaxies are forming stars. What does a typical star-forming region look like? What is it composed of? How are stars born in these nebulas? Join us to probe what we know—and don’t yet know—about the physics of star-formation, and how astronomers around the world are trying to answer these questions of stellar genesis with ground- and space-based telescopes.

Host: Dr. Frank Summers of the Space Telescope Science Institute

Recorded live on Tuesday, January 14, 2020, at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.

More information: www.stsci.edu/public-lectures

Crab Nebula: The Multiwavelength Structure of a Pulsar Wind Nebula

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This visualization features a three-dimensional multiwavelength representation of the Crab Nebula, a pulsar wind nebula that is the remains of an exploded star. The movie is based on images from NASA’s three Great Observatories: the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes.

The movie begins by showing the Crab Nebula in context, pinpointing the location of the observed supernova in the constellation Taurus. This view zooms in to present the Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra images of the Crab Nebula, each highlighting one of the nested structures in the system.

The video then begins a slow buildup of the three-dimensional X-ray structure, showing the pulsar and disk of energized material, and adding jets of particles firing off from opposite sides of the energetic dynamo.

Appearing next is a rotating infrared view of a glowing cloud of emission, called synchrotron radiation, enveloping the pulsar system. This distinctive form of radiation occurs when streams of charged particles spiral around the pulsar’s magnetic field lines.

The visible-light outer shell of the Crab Nebula appears next. Looking like a cage around the entire system, this shell of glowing gas consists of tentacle-shaped filaments of ionized oxygen. The tsunami of particles unleashed by the pulsar is pushing on this expanding debris cloud like an animal rattling its cage.

The X-ray, infrared, and visible-light models are combined at the end of the movie to reveal both a rotating three-dimensional multiwavelength view and the corresponding two-dimensional multiwavelength image of the Crab Nebula.

Credit: NASA, ESA, F. Summers, J. Olmsted, L. Hustak, J. DePasquale, G. Bacon (STScI), N. Wolk (CfA|H&S/CXC), R. Hurt (Caltech/IPAC)

Length: 3 minutes 43 seconds

Zoom and Pan of the Coma Cluster

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This video zooms into and then pans across a Hubble Space Telescope mosaic of the immense Coma cluster of over 1,000 galaxies, located 300 million light-years from Earth, revealing thousands of globular star clusters (circled in green).

Hubble was used to do a comprehensive census of the cluster’s most diminutive members: a whopping 22,426 globular star clusters (circled in green). Among the earliest homesteaders of the universe, globular star clusters are snow-globe-shaped islands of several hundred thousand ancient stars. The survey found the globular clusters scattered in space between the galaxies. They have been orphaned from their home galaxy due to galaxy near-collisions inside the traffic-jammed galaxy cluster. Astronomers will use the globular cluster field for mapping the distribution of matter and dark matter in the Coma galaxy cluster.

Read the news release: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2018/news-2018-44.html

Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. DePasquale and G. Bacon (STScI)