Celestial Objects
Crescent Nebula
Nebulae
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The Crescent Nebula is an emission nebula in the constellation Cygnus, about 5,000 light-years from Earth, discovered by William Herschel in 1792. It formed when the fast stellar wind of the Wolf-Rayet star WR 136 collided with slower-moving material the star had shed earlier as a red giant roughly 250,000 years ago, a collision that produced a shell bounded by two shock waves, one moving outward and one moving inward, the inward wave heating the older stellar wind to temperatures hot enough to emit X-rays.
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