The iconic Pillars of Creation, where new stars are forming beneath dense clouds of gas and dust, have been imaged by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope as a rich, extremely realistic environment. Although they are far more porous, the three-dimensional pillars resemble beautiful rock formations. The chilly interstellar gas and dust that make up these columns may seem semi-transparent in near-infrared light.
By identifying much more accurate counts of newly formed stars as well as the quantities of gas and dust in the region, Webb’s new view of the Pillars of Creation, which NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope first made famous when it imaged them in 1995, will aid researchers in revising their models of star formation. They will gradually get a better grasp of how stars grow in these dusty clouds over millions of years and then explode out of them.
This photo was taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera and features newly created stars as the main attraction (NIRCam). These are the brilliant red orbs that are usually outside one of the dusty pillars and contain diffraction spikes. Within the pillars of gas and dust, knots that have amassed sufficient mass start to collapse under their own gravitational pull, slowly heat up, and finally give birth to new stars.
What about those wavy lines at the rims of certain pillars that resemble lava? These are star-forming stellar ejections from the surrounding gas and dust. Periodically, young stars emit supersonic jets that slam into dense pillar-like clouds of matter. In some cases, this also leads to bow shocks, which can create wavy patterns similar to what a boat makes when it travels across water. The vibrant hydrogen molecules produced by jets and shocks are what give off the color. The NIRCam picture almost pulses with their activity, as seen in the second and third pillars from the top. The age of these newborn stars is only thought to be a few hundred thousand years.
There are hardly any galaxies in this image, despite the impression that Webb has used near-infrared light to “punch through” the clouds and expose vast cosmic expanses beyond the pillars. Instead, the densest region of our Milky Way galaxy’s disk, which contains the interstellar medium, obscures our view of much of the deeper cosmos.
Hubble initially captured this view in 1995 and returned to it in 2014, but other observatories have also given this area their undivided attention. Each cutting-edge piece of equipment provides researchers with fresh information about this area, which is virtually bursting at the seams with stars.
The expansive Eagle Nebula, about 6,500 light-years away, is seen in this closely cropped photograph.
