The Crab Nebula‘s evolution has been revealed in a stunning 2024 cosmic display captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, evidencing how much the cosmos can change in a mere quarter of a century.
The discovery, detailed in a recent study analyzing how much the iconic nebula has changed since the first Hubble observations of it in 1999, recently appeared in The Astrophysical Journal.
Astronomers believe the Crab Nebula represents the aftermath of a supernova, which involves the fiery death of a star, which is now powered by the Crab pulsar, appearing as a shimmering beacon that shines across the universe.
Hubble Observes a Supernova
For almost a millennium, humans have observed this intriguing portion of the sky. Ancient Chinese sources, as well as much later references from other parts of the globe, tell of an explosive cosmic event in 1054 that was so brilliant it could be seen—even in daylight hours—for weeks. This was the supernova, now known as SN1054, that gave birth to the beautiful Crab Nebula, located in the constellation Taurus, some 6,500 light-years away.
“We tend to think of the sky as being unchanging, immutable,” said lead author William Blair of Johns Hopkins University. “However, with the longevity of the Hubble Space Telescope, even an object like the Crab Nebula is revealed to be in motion, still expanding from the explosion nearly a millennium ago.”
Discovering the Crab Nebula
Hundreds of years later, in 1758, the influential French astronomer Charles Messier was the first to observe the nebula left behind by the 1054 supernova. At first, he misidentified it as Haley’s Comet, which he had been initially seeking. To avoid repeating the mistake, it became the first of the Messier objects, M1, which eventually grew into a catalogue of 110 objects that astronomers still use today.
In 1928, Edwin Hubble, namesake of the Hubble Space Telescope, first proposed that M1 and the 1054 object were one and the same. It wasn’t until the 1960s, with the discovery of pulsars, that astronomers knew what powered the stellar remnants. The Crab pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star, was discovered to be the source of the object’s brilliance.
Appropriately, as the Hubble Space Telescope would observe Edwin Hubble’s discovery, some upgrades were necessary. A crucial piece of capturing the stunning 2024 image was the Wide Field 3 camera, installed during the last Hubble update in 2009.
“Even though I’ve worked with Hubble quite a bit, I was still struck by the amount of detailed structure we can see and the increased resolution with the Wide Field Camera 3, as compared to 25 years ago,” Blair said.
Analyzing the Hubble Image
The Hubble Space Telescope’s latest Crab Nebula imagery displays the object’s fine filamentary structure in high resolution. Modern reprocessing of the original 1999 image allowed astronomers to observe how those filaments have moved. Over the last quarter century, the filaments have expanded outward at 3.4 million miles per hour.
Those filaments closer to the edge appear to be moving faster than those nearer to the center, pushed along by the synchrotron radiation created when the nebula’s material interacts with the pulsar’s magnetic field. This is unusual, as in other nebulae, the remaining shockwaves from the initial supernova are the force behind continued expansion. Additionally, changes in density and temperature are readily apparent in the color differences between the two observations.
The resolution of the latest Hubble imagery is so high that bits of shadow visible in the 2D image are providing astronomers with new clues as to the nebula’s 3D shape. Going forward, Blair’s team aims to continue their research, pairing this Hubble data with Crab Nebula observations at other wavelengths captured by other platforms, such as the 2024 James Webb Space Telescope.
The paper, “The Crab Nebula Revisited Using HST/WFC3,” appeared in The Astrophysical Journal on January 15, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.