In celebration of its upcoming 25th anniversary, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has revisited the famous pillars, providing astronomers with a sharper and wider view.
This image shows the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation as seen in visible light, capturing the multi-colored glow of gas clouds, wispy tendrils of dark cosmic dust, and the rust-colored elephants’ trunks of the nebula’s famous pillars. The dust and gas in the pillars is seared by the intense radiation from young stars and eroded by strong winds from massive nearby stars. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Hubble Heritage Team.
In 1995 Hubble’s iconic image, dubbed the Pillars of Creation, revealed never-before-seen details in the giant columns and now the telescope is kickstarting its 25th year in orbit with an even clearer, and more stunning, image of these beautiful structures.
The three impressive towers of gas and dust captured in the new image are part of the Eagle Nebula, also known as Messier 16 (M16).
Dr Paul Scowen of Arizona State University in Tempe, who, with astronomer Dr Jeff Hester led the original Hubble observations of the Eagle Nebula, said the image hints that the M16’s structures are also pillars of destruction.
He explained: “I’m impressed by how transitory these structures are. They are actively being ablated away before our very eyes. The ghostly bluish haze around the dense edges of the pillars is material getting heated up and evaporating away into space. We have caught these pillars at a very unique and short-lived moment in their evolution.”
When Dr Scowen and Dr Hester used Hubble to make the initial observations of M16 twenty years ago, scientists had seen the pillar-like structures in ground-based images, but not in detail.
They knew that the physical processes are not unique to the nebula because star birth takes place across the Universe.
But at a distance of just 6,500 light-years, the Eagle Nebula is the most dramatic nearby example, as the team soon realized.
The first features that jumped out at the team in 1995 were the streamers of gas seemingly floating away from the columns.
“There is only one thing that can light up a neighborhood like this: massive stars kicking out enough horsepower in UV light to ionize the gas clouds and make them glow,” Dr Scowen said.
“Nebulous star-forming regions like M16 are the interstellar neon signs that say ‘we just made a bunch of massive stars here.”
“This was the first time we had directly seen observational evidence that the erosionary process, not only the radiation but the mechanical stripping away of the gas from the columns, was actually being seen.”
By comparing the 1995 and 2014 pictures, the astronomers also noticed a lengthening of a narrow jet-like feature that may have been ejected from a newly forming star.
The jet looks like a stream of water from a garden hose. Over the intervening twenty years, this jet has stretched farther into space, across an additional 97 billion km, at an estimated speed of about 720,000 km per hour.
Our Sun probably formed in a similar turbulent star-forming region. There is evidence that the forming Solar System was seasoned with radioactive shrapnel from a nearby supernova. That means that our Sun was formed as part of a cluster that included stars massive enough to produce powerful ionizing radiation, such as is seen in the Eagle Nebula.
This image shows the Pillars of Creation in infrared light, allowing it to pierce through obscuring dust and gas and unveil a more unfamiliar view of the object. In this ethereal view the entire frame is peppered with bright stars and baby stars are revealed being formed within the pillars themselves. The ghostly outlines of the pillars seem much more delicate, and are silhouetted against an eerie blue haze. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Hubble Heritage Team.
In addition to the new visible-light image, Hubble has also produced a bonus image, taken in infrared light.
The image unveils a more unfamiliar view of the Pillars of Creation, transforming them into wispy silhouettes set against a background peppered with stars.
Here newborn stars, hidden in the visible-light view, can be seen forming within the pillars themselves.
At the top edge of the left-hand pillar, a gaseous fragment has been heated up and is flying away from the structure, underscoring the violent nature of star-forming regions.
“These pillars represent a very dynamic, active process,” Dr Scowen said.
“The gas is not being passively heated up and gently wafting away into space. The gaseous pillars are actually getting ionized – a process by which electrons are stripped off of atoms – and heated up by radiation from the massive stars. And then they are being eroded by the stars’ strong winds, which are sandblasting away the tops of these pillars.”
