[ MUSIC ]
[ INSIDE THE IMAGE // HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE ]
[ CRAB NEBULA ]
This is an image of the Crab Nebula, which is one of the most famous
and most well-studied astronomical objects ever.
It's one of the touchstone images from the Hubble Space Telescope.
It's just the most beautiful,
awe inspiring image you can imagine.
Technically, it's actually called a pulsar wind nebula,
and we can connect it to events in history going back to the year 1054,
where Chinese astronomers
recorded the appearance of a new star, which they called a guest star.
That got incredibly bright, that you could see it during the daytime,
which we now know was a supernova explosion that was visible
to the naked eye during the day for about two weeks, maybe longer.
What we're seeing here, this filamentary structure
is actually density variations in that material.
So as that material was spewed from the star in the supernova explosion,
it's still got the fingerprints of that explosion.
It's still expanding out into the surrounding medium.
So what we're able to see are knots of material
made up of things like oxygen, sulfur.
And in this full color image, the oxygen is coming out separately
from the sulfur where the the greenish, yellowish
tinge is really oxygen heavy.
Embedded in this nebula is the pulsar at the center.
And it's very energetic,
so it's spewing out energy at all wavelengths, actually.
And some of that energy is being captured by the material surrounding the pulsar.
And then that material glows and it glows in a certain wavelength
or color, depending on what it's made of.
So all the material that we're seeing here is actually from the star itself.
It's been blown out in that supernova explosion,
but it's being illuminated by the pulsar in the center.
Oxygen is
such an important element of life on the planet Earth.
We are breathing in oxygen as we speak.
Where did that oxygen come from?
It came from the hearts of stars.
They made the oxygen in fusion and they expelled it
back into the interstellar medium.
We're actually watching that happen here.
Maybe someday there will be a planet there with an atmosphere that includes oxygen
that can be breathed by living organisms like us.
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