The Crab Nebula: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

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Scientific paper

Too many objects have been referred to as ``laboratories'' for studying some astrophysical phenomena or other, but in the case of the Crab Nebula the analogy is apt. The remnant of a supernova witnessed by Chinese astronomers in 1054 AD, the Crab provides us with an often unique look at the structure of the wind from a pulsar, shocks and synchrotron cooling instabilities in a relativistic plasma, magnetic Raleigh-Taylor instabilities between relativistic and thermal plasma, radiative shocks, and power-law photoionization of thermal ejecta, to name a but a few of the phenomena seen. In my talk I will discuss a number of recent observational and theoretical results on the Crab, and how they have changed our understanding of this object. Highlights will include recent Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory movies of the dynamics of the inner synchrotron nebula, and a Hubble mosaic of the line emission from the filaments. The talk will focus on the physics at work behind what we see. Perhaps the most surprising outcome of this work is that all of these pieces fit together into a single consistent picture of the Crab as a confined bubble of relativistic plasma pushing its way outward through a much larger freely expanding cloud of material ejected by the supernova.

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