Spectroscopy and 3D imaging of the Crab nebula

Abstract

Spectroscopy of the Crab nebula along different slit directions reveals the 3 dimensional structure of the optical nebula. On the basis of the linear radial expansion result first discovered by Trimble (1968), we make a 3D model of the optical emission. Results from a limited number of slit directions suggest that optical lines originate from a complicated array of wisps that are located in a rather thin shell, pierced by a jet. The jet is certainly not prominent in optical emission lines, but the direction of the piercing is consistent with the direction of the X-ray and radio jet. The shell's effective radius is ~ 79 seconds of arc, its thickness about a third of the radius and it is moving out with an average velocity 1160 km/s.

21 pages, 14 figures, submitted to ApJ, 3D movie of the Crab nebula available at http://www.fiz.uni-lj.si/~vidrih/

References in corpus (2)

• The Crab Nebula's Moving Wisps in Radio
• Crab Pulsar Photometry and the Signature of Free Precession

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• 3D mapping of the Crab Nebula with SITELLE. I. Deconvolution and kinematic reconstruction
• The Crab Nebula's Dynamical Age as Measured from its Northern Filamentary Jet
• Phenomenological modelling of the Crab Nebula's broad band energy spectrum and its apparent extension
• Properties of the three-dimensional structure in the central region of the supernova remnant SNR 0540-69.3
• Science results from the imaging Fourier transform spectrometer SpIOMM