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Tag: Crab Nebula

This Picture of the Week shows a stunning spiral galaxy known as NGC 4945. This little corner of space, near the constellation of Centaurus and over 12 million light-years away, may seem peaceful at first — but NGC 4945 is locked in a violent struggle. At the very centre of nearly every galaxy is a supermassive black hole. Some, like the one at the centre of our own Milky Way, aren’t particularly hungry. But NGC 4945’s supermassive black hole is ravenous, consuming huge amounts of matter — and the MUSE instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has caught it playing with its food. This messy eater, contrary to a black hole’s typical all-consuming reputation, is blowing out powerful winds of material. This cone-shaped wind is shown in red in the inset, overlaid on a wider image captured with the MPG/ESO telescope at La Silla. In fact, this wind is moving so fast that it will end up escaping the galaxy altogether, lost to the void of intergalactic space. This is part of a new study that measured how winds move in several nearby galaxies. The MUSE observations show that these incredibly fast winds demonstrate a strange behaviour: they actually speed up far away from the central black hole, accelerating even more on their journey to the galactic outskirts. This process ejects potential star-forming material from a galaxy, suggesting that black holes control the fates of their host galaxies by dampening the stellar birth rate. It also shows that the more powerful black holes impede their own growth by removing the gas and dust they feed on, driving the whole system closer towards a sort of galactic equilibrium. Now, with these new results, we are one step closer to understanding the acceleration mechanism of the winds responsible for shaping the evolution of galaxies, and the history of the universe. Links Research paper in Nature Astronomy by Marconcini et al. Close-up view of NGC 4945’s nucleus

Astronomers Find ‘Punctum,’ a Bizarre Space Object That Might be Unlike Anything in the Universe

August 15, 2025

Bright, polarized, and unseen in any other light — Punctum challenges astrophysical norms.

Astronomers use JWST to peer into the heart of the Crab Nebula

Scientific papers rarely have images this spectacular in them.

The rapidly spinning neutron star embedded in the center of the Crab nebula is the dynamo powering the nebula's eerie interior bluish glow. The blue light comes from electrons whirling at nearly the speed of light around magnetic field lines from the neutron star. The neutron star, the crushed ultra-dense core of the exploded star, like a lighthouse, ejects twin beams of radiation that appear to pulse 30 times a second.

How Black Holes and Neutron Stars Shine

November 28, 2019

Black holes and neutron stars are the densest and most mysterious objects in the universe, and researchers may have figured ...

Crab Nebula as seen by Hubble and Herschel. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The most energetic light recorded thus far hits Tibetan plateau

Gamma-ray particles trillions of times more energetic than regular light hit the Tibetan plateau.

The Crab Nebula.

Stunning image of the Crab Nebula put together from five telescopes’ worth of data

byAlexandru Micu

Breathtaking.

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© 2007-2025 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.