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At the centre of the nebula is the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star remnant of the supernova which is roughly 10 kilometers in diameter discovered in 1969. The Crab Pulsar rotates 33 times each second, and the beams of radiation it emits interact with the nebular gasses to produce complex patterns of wind and fluorescence. The most dynamic feature in the inner part of the Crab is the point where one of the pulsar's polar jets runs into the surrounding material forming a shock front. The shape and position of this feature shifts rapidly, with the equatorial wind appearing as a series of wisp-like features that steepen, brighten, then fade as they move away from the pulsar to well out into the main body of the nebula.
The Crab nebula is often used as a calibration source in X-ray astronomy. It is very bright in X-rays and the flux density[?] and spectrum are known to be constant, with the exception of the pulsar. The pulsar provides a strong periodic signal that is used to check the timing of the X-ray detectors. In X-ray astronomy, 'Crab' and 'milliCrab' are sometimes used as units of flux density. Very few X-ray sources ever exceed one Crab in brightness.
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