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The Nature Of [Ar Iii]-Bright Knots In The Crab Nebula, Emily L. Schaller, Robert A. Fesen

Dartmouth Scholarship

The kinematic and morphological properties of a string of [Ar III] bright knots in the CrabNebula are examined using 1994 – 1999 HST WFPC-2 images of the remnant. We find that five southern [Ar III] bright knots exhibit ordinary radial motions away from the nebula’s center of expansion with magnitudes consistent with their projected radial displacements. This result does not support the suggestion by MacAlpine et al. (1994) that these knots might be moving rapidly away from the Crab pulsar due to a collimated wind. The HST images also do not show that the [Ar III] knots have unusual morphologies …