The iconic Pillars of Creation, where new stars are forming beneath dense clouds of gas and dust, have been caught by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope in a luxuriant, exquisitely realistic scene. Although they are far more permeable, the three-dimensional pillars resemble beautiful rock formations. Cool interstellar gas and dust, which can occasionally look semi-transparent in near-infrared light, make up these columns.
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 develop 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 formed stars as the main attraction (NIRCam). These are the bright 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.
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What about those wavy lines at the rims of some 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. This can be seen in the second and third pillars from the top, where their activity can literally be felt as a pulsating in the NIRCam image. The age of these newborn stars is only thought to be a few hundred thousand years.
There aren't any galaxies in this image, despite the impression that Webb was able to "punch through" the clouds using near-infrared light to expose vast cosmic distances beyond the pillars. Instead, our perspective of the deeper cosmos is obscured by the interstellar medium, a mixture of transparent gas and dust in the densest region of the disk of our Milky Way galaxy.
Hubble first captured this view in 1995 and returned to it in 2014, but other other observatories have also given this area their undivided attention. Each cutting-edge equipment provides researchers with fresh information about this region, which is virtually bursting at the seams with stars.
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The expansive Eagle Nebula, about 6,500 light-years away, is depicted in this closely cropped photograph.
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The best space scientific observatory in the world is the James Webb Space Telescope. In addition to looking beyond our solar system to distant planets orbiting other stars, Webb will delve into the enigmatic architecture and origins of the cosmos and our role within it. CSA and ESA are partners in the international Webb program, which is run by NASA.
