Abstract
The faint radio1 and emission line2 ‘jet’ outward from the northern boundary of the Crab nebula (here called the ‘stem’) appears as a neat right cylinder (ref. 3 and R. Fesen, personal communication), which is lengthening and expanding. Here we model the glowing cylinder as the convected margin of a gas cloud that accidentally cast its shadow across the nearly ballistic flow of the stellar envelope ejected in the supernova explosion. We show that this model is consistent with known data on the stem and that it accounts for the strikingly regular geometrical features in a natural way. In contrast, flow instability models2–6, although in many ways appealing, do not easily result in so neat a cylinder.
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Morrison, P., Roberts, D. A shadowed flow in the stem of the Crab nebula?. Nature 313, 661–662 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1038/313661a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/313661a0
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