[News Focus] Astronomy: The Crab That Roared

Science 16 August 2013:
Vol. 341 no. 6147 pp. 710-711
DOI: 10.1126/science.341.6147.710 Astronomy Astronomy When researchers with the AGILE gamma ray satellite first saw the readings 6 years ago, they didn't believe them. The Crab nebula, an 11-light-year-wide blob of glowing gas left over from an ancient supernova explosion, seemed to be spewing out enormous amounts of gamma radiation. Impossible, the scientists thought. The Crab was famously steady and quiet (so much so that astrophysicists used its emissions to calibrate their detectors), and AGILE was still in its hiccup-prone shakedown phase. So the scientists filed the data away as instrumental error. It was another 3 years before a chance observation revealed that the truth about the Crab nebula was more complicated than anyone had suspected.

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