The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first on Charles Messier's
famous list of things which are not comets. In
fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova
remnant, an expanding cloud of debris from the explosion of a massive star. The
violent birth of the Crab was witnessed by
astronomers in the year 1054. Roughly 10 light-years across today, the
nebula is still expanding at a rate of over 1,000 kilometers per second.
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