The Crab Nebula is an expanding remnant of a star’s supernova explosion! 💥 Located about 6,500 light-years away, the orange filaments are the tattered remains of the star and consist mostly of hydrogen. Like a lighthouse, the neutron star embedded at the nebula’s center produces twin beams of radiation. From Earth, it appears to pulse 30 times a second due to the neutron star’s rotation sweeping the beams across our line of sight. It has the mass equivalent of our Sun crammed into a rapidly spi

Visible light ➡️ infrared! These two Hubble views of the Lagoon Nebula highlight different aspects of this spectacular cosmic object. In visible light, we see mountains of gas and dust surrounding a very hot newborn star. But the near-infrared light reveals an abundance of stars. Most of them are distant, background stars located behind the nebula itself. However, some of these pinpricks of light are young stars within the Lagoon Nebula. Visualization credits: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI) Mus