Six thousand five hundred light-years mean practically nothing for the vastness of the Universe, but it’s absolutely impossible for us humans to travel it unless we encounter a wormhole on the way (shortcuts in spacetime). Since wormholes aren’t naturally occurring phenomenons, we’ll have to count on something else to get anywhere near the Crab Nebula from the Taurus constellation.
Nevertheless, even if we’ll ever find a way to travel such distances during a human lifetime, getting too close to the Crab Nebula is practically suicide. It won’t be possible anytime in the near future, but let’s not forget that technology evolves at a staggering rate.
Huge radio pulses and X-rays are coming from the Crab Nebula
CNN writes that huge amounts of energy are spewed by the Crab Nebula into space, and the discovery was made by a global team of scientists who used data from NASA’s NICER telescope mounted on the International Space Station.
The scientific team collected 3.7 million pulsar rotations and 26,000 giant radio pulses.
Study author Teruaki Enoto declared:
Out of more than 2,800 pulsars cataloged, the Crab pulsar is one of only a few that emit giant radio pulses, which occur sporadically and can be hundreds to thousands of times brighter than the regular pulses.
Enoto also added:
After decades of observations, only the Crab has been shown to enhance its giant radio pulses with emission from other parts of the spectrum.
The Crab Nebula is the debris of a supernova that exploded. After first transforming into a neutron star, the nebula became a pulsar, meaning a rapidly spinning neutron star.
The new study was published in the journal Science.
