In the year 1054, astronomers witnessed a violent birth of a celestial object — the Crab Nebula. Cataloged as M1, which is the first on Charles Messier’s famous list of things that are not comets, the Crab Nebula continues to expand up to this day at a rate of 1,000 kilometers per second.
Over the past decade, its expansion has been documented in this stunning time-lapse movie. In each year from 2008 to 2017, an image was produced with the same telescope and camera from a remote observatory in Austria. Combined in the time-lapse movie, the 10 images represent 32 hours of total integration time. The sharp, processed frames even reveal the dynamic energetic emission within the incredible expanding Crab. The Crab Nebula lies about 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.
(Video Credit: APOD Videos/ YouTube)