Discovery of Crab Nebula

The AD 1054 supernova remnant, the Crab Nebula, one of the brightest in history, recorded by Chinese and Arab astronomers and also by the monks of St. Gallen monastery. Crab Nebula was discovered by English physician and amateur astronomer John Bevis in 1731. One of the most active observers of the heavens in Georgian England, Bevis maintained a private observatory outside the city and about the year 1745, compiled a set of ornate star chars, the Uranographia Brittanica.

Crab Nebula

The same year that Bevis died, Crab Nebula was rediscovered by Charles Messier in 1758.  William Herschel, who observed it not long after Messier, thought he could see individual stars in the cloud.

In 1884, Lord Rosse published a first sketch of M1, and gave the name ‘Crab Nebula’ because it look a bit like a scorpion or a crab.

John Duncan found in 1921 that the nebula is expanding. In 1949, the radio astronomers Boltoin, Stanley and Slee identified the Crab Nebula as a radio source, making it the first non-solar system radio to be identified with a known optical object.

The detection of the Crab Pulsar at the centre of the Crab Nebula gave final confirmation to the theory that the core of a gravitational collapsing star settles down to the equilibrium state of a neutron star, if it is mass is inferior to the relevant Chandrasekhar limit.
Discovery of Crab Nebula