Scale and Compass for Crab Nebula. Credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI)
The eerie glow of a dead star, which exploded long ago as a supernova, reveals itself in this Hubble image of the Crab Nebula. But don’t be fooled. The ghoulish-looking object still has a pulse. Buried at its center is the star’s tell-tale heart, which beats with rhythmic precision. The “heart” is the crushed core of the exploded star. Called a neutron star, it has about the same mass as the sun but is squeezed into an ultra-dense sphere that is only a few miles across and 100 billion times stronger than steel. The tiny powerhouse is the bright star-like object near the center of the image.
This surviving remnant is a tremendous dynamo, spinning 30X /s...
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