Astronomers have taken a breathtaking journey deep into the Crab Nebula, the famous remnant of an exploding star that dazzled Chinese astronomers in the 11th century.

A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the glowing heart of the supernova, where a super-dense neutron star spins surrounded by swirling ionised gas moving at almost the speed of light.

The neutron star is the dead "core" of a massive star that blasted itself apart in a violent supernova at the end of its life.

When the explosion happened, 6,500 light years away in the constellation of Taurus, it caused a new bright star to appear in the night sky on Earth.

For a short time the star was the brightest object in the sky, after the moon.

Chinese and Japanese astronomers recorded the event in 1054 AD and watched as the star gradually faded, becoming invisible to the naked eye over the course of several years.

Today the ragged gas cloud streaked with filaments known as the Crab Nebula is one of the most recognisable astronomical objects.

It has been photographed many times before, but never in such detail.

Neutron stars have about the same mass as the Sun, but compressed into a sphere only a few tens of kilometres across.

They typically spin at high speed. The one at the centre of the Crab Nebula rotates at around 30 times a second, stirring up and energising the gas around it.