A team of scientists used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to parse the composition of the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.
A team of scientists used NASA 's James Webb Space Telescope to parse the composition of the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.
The Crab Nebula is also highly unusual. Its atypical composition and very low explosion energy previously have been explained by an electron-capture supernova -- a rare type of explosion that arises from a star with a less-evolved core made of oxygen, neon, and magnesium, rather than a more typical iron core.
Theories predict that because of the different chemical composition of the core in an electron-capture supernova, the nickel to iron abundance ratio should be much higher than the ratio measured in our Sun . Studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s measured the Ni/Fe ratio within the Crab using optical and near-infrared data and noted a high Ni/Fe abundance ratio that seemed to favor the electron-capture supernova scenario.
"At present, the spectral data from Webb covers two small regions of the Crab, so it's important to study much more of the remnant and identify any spatial variations," said Martin Laming of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington and a co-author of the paper."It would be interesting to see if we could identify emission lines from other elements, like cobalt or germanium.
Astronomy Stars Astrophysics Black Holes NASA Space Telescopes Galaxies
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