This is a pillar—but not an architectural one. It is a cosmic structure made of gas and dust, with stars hidden inside it. The pillars are part of a much larger cosmic cloud called the Eagle Nebula, catalogued as M16, roughly 7,000 light-years away.
The source gives the Eagle Nebula an age of about 5.5 million years, very young on cosmic timescales. Yet within that short period, these clouds have become a birthplace for numerous stars at different stages of formation, hence the famous name “Pillars of Creation.” The gas and dust that formed our own Sun more than four billion years ago probably existed in a broadly similar star-forming environment.
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| Image from the original article |
The article places the Eagle Nebula within a major star-forming region of our Galaxy and discusses its location in the constellation Serpens. It recounts that Swiss astronomer Philippe Loys de Chéseaux observed the associated star cluster in the eighteenth century; Charles Messier catalogued the object in 1764; and Edward Barnard later produced early photographs in 1895. [source] [source] [source] [source]
The intricate forms visible throughout the pillars are sculpted by energetic flows from hot young stars. Their stellar winds contain high-energy particles that erode and shape the surrounding gas and dust. [source] [source]
In the processed image described by the source, different colours trace different elements: red represents sulfur, blue represents oxygen, and green represents hydrogen. [source]
Stars hidden inside the dust
The stellar nursery conceals many of its newborn stars behind dust. In visible light we primarily see the glowing gas and obscuring material, but signs of ongoing star formation are still apparent. The article points to two jets of gaseous material on opposite sides of a dark region near the centre of the pillar. Each jet is described as roughly 10 light-years long and moving at more than one million kilometres per hour, evidence of young stars still wrapped in dusty cocoons.
To look deeper into the pillars, astronomers turn from visible light to infrared radiation. The article originally invited readers to move the mouse over the image to switch to an infrared view. Both visible and infrared versions discussed there were taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in January 2015. It also notes earlier Hubble observations using the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) after the telescope's 2009 servicing mission. [source]
Infrared observations can reveal stars hidden behind dust because they sample a different region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The cold gas and dust of the pillars, only a small number of kelvins above absolute zero in the source's description, behaves very differently from the hot young stars embedded within it. At infrared wavelengths, obscuring material becomes less dominant and many of the warmer stellar sources emerge more clearly. [source] [source] [source] [source] [source]
The Pillars of Creation are among the most famous images produced during Hubble's first 25 years of operation. The article closes by mentioning a 2007 study proposing that a nearby supernova may already have disrupted the pillars around six thousand years earlier. Under that hypothesis, because of the object's great distance, Earth would not see the resulting destruction for roughly another thousand years. This is preserved here as the study's proposal as reported by the original article. [source] [source]