Crab Nebula (MIRI & NIRCam)

The Crab Nebula, located 6,500 light-years away, is the remnant of a massive star that exploded in a supernova nearly a thousand years ago. In this image, data from Webb’s NIRCam and MIRI instruments reveal new details about the nebula’s composition and structure. For the first time, astronomers have mapped the warm dust emission throughout the nebula, shown here in magenta. These dusty filaments form a delicate, cage-like structure, especially visible in the lower left and upper right, threaded through the interior and overlapping with regions of doubly ionized sulfur, seen in green. Where the two align, they appear yellow-white. A blue haze flows through the center, made up of synchrotron emission from electrons spiraling along magnetic field lines created by the nebula’s pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star. This emission helps trace the dynamic energy at the Crab’s core and supports theories that its progenitor star may have been far from ordinary.