This small, region of the Crab Nebula is an enlargement of part of the preceding picture, Due to the filters employed, the image shows the light from the gaseous filaments of the nebula - shreds of the shattered supernova star - and does not show the thinner and hotter part of the nebula that consists of electrons and protons streaming outward at high velocity from the pulsar at the heart of the Crab Nebula. However, the picture suggests the likely nature of the process that gives many of the filaments their shape. Seen at the high resolution of the WFPC2, each small filament has a head consisting of a dense clump of gas, rather like the head of a comet (although a comet also has a small solid nucleus within its head and these filaments do not). Stretching back from the head, the filament may be like a streamer of gas blown outward from the head by the thin hot gas, which is expanding outward from the pulsar.
Camera: WFPC2
Technical information: Composite of three
images taken in the light of cool oxygen (red), sulfur (blue), and hot
oxygen (green).
Credit: J. Hester and P. Scowen (Arizona
State University), and NASA
