Moving heart of the Crab Nebula – M1

Peering deep into M1, this spectacular Hubble image captures the nebula’s beating heart: the rapidly spinning pulsar at its core. Bright wisps are moving outward from the pulsar (the rightmost of the two bright stars near the center of the image) at half the speed of light to form an expanding ring. These wisps form along magnetic field lines in a gas of extremely energetic particles driven into space by the highly magnetized, rapidly rotating neutron star.