Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 August 2015
Photo-electric measurements made in Leiden in the first part of 1955 and extended by one of us at the Observatoire de Haute Provence in October 1955, show that the light of the Crab nebula is strongly polarized. The presence of polarization was first suggested by Vashakidze [2] and was firmly established by photo-electric measures by Dombrovsky [3] in 1954. The present observations, which are much more detailed, show that 17 % of the light coming from the central part, with a mean radius of 0′·8, is linearly polarized. It may be seen that over the entire bright part of the nebula the polarizations are sensibly parallel, while in the outer parts they tend to be oriented at random.