Famous Crab Nebula Shoots Off Mysterious Flares
By Clara Moskowitz
SPACE.com Senior Writer
posted: 06 January 2011
02:02 pm ET

One of the most well-known celestial objects still has some tricks up its sleeve, according to a new discovery of surprising gamma-ray flares coming from the famous Crab Nebula.

The Crab, long-considered such a steady celestial light that it was used to calibrate other sources, has now had three flare-ups where it brightened significantly in the gamma-ray range for a few days, astronomers report. [Hubble photo of the Crab nebula]

“Our belief of a stable Crab got smashed completely — now we have to think again,” said Marco Tavani, an astronomer at the INAF-IASF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica-Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica) in Rome. Tavani was lead author of one of two papers announcing the discovery of the flares in the Jan. 7 issue of the journal SCIENCE.

(Note:  For somr time now I have been referring to some unexpected energy coming from the galaxy.  Perhaps this is a reported verification of the movement of that energy.)