Amazing Star-Filled Portrait of Pillars of Creation by NASA’s Webb Space
The iconic Pillars of Creation, where new stars are forming beneath dense clouds of gas and dust, have been captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope as a lush, highly detailed landscape.
The Pillars of Creation are set off in a kaleidoscope of color in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared-light view.
The three-dimensional pillars resemble majestic rock formations but are far more permeable. In other words –
The pillars look like arches and spires rising out of a desert landscape, but are filled with semi-transparent gas and dust, and are ever-changing.
The cool interstellar gas and dust that make up these columns sometimes appear semi-transparent in near-infrared light.
This is a region where young stars are forming – or have barely burst from their dusty cocoons as they continue to form.
The Pillars of Creation first became famous when it was captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.
Webb’s new view of the Pillars of Creation will aid researchers in revising their models of star formation by identifying far more precise counts of newly formed stars as well as the quantities of gas and dust in the region.
Over time, they will begin to make a clearer grasp of how stars form and burst out of these dusty clouds over millions of years.
Newly formed stars in this image captured by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) are bright red orbs that typically have diffraction spikes and lie outside one of the dusty pillars.
Within the pillars of gas and dust, when knots form with sufficient mass, they start to collapse under their own gravity, slowly heat up, and eventually give birth to new stars.
Wavy lines, in this image, that look like lava at the edges of some pillars are ejections from stars that are still forming within the gas and dust.
Periodically, young stars shoot out supersonic jets that collide with thick pillar-like clouds of material. This sometimes also results in bow shocks, which can form wavy patterns like a boat does as it moves through the water.
The crimson glow comes from the energetic hydrogen molecules that result from jets and shocks. The NIRCam image practically pulses with their activity, as is evident in the second and third pillars from the top.
These young stars are estimated to be only a few hundred thousand years old.
Hubble first captured this view in 1995 and revisited it in 2014, but many other observatories have also stared deeply at this region. Each advanced instrument offers researchers new details about this star-filled region.
This tightly cropped image is set within the vast Eagle Nebula, which lies 6,500 light-years away.