Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have created a 3D map of the iconic Pillars of Creation.
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.
The three gigantic towers of gas and dust are part of the Eagle Nebula, also known as Messier 16.
They are located in the constellation Serpens, approximately 6,500 light-years away, and consist of several distinct pieces on either side of the star cluster NGC 6611.
The pillars arise when immense, freshly formed blue-white O and B stars give off intense UV radiation and stellar winds that blow away less dense materials from their vicinity.
Denser pockets of gas and dust, however, can resist this erosion for longer. Behind such thicker dust pockets, material is shielded from the harsh, withering glare of O and B stars. This shielding creates dark ‘tails’ or ‘elephant trunks,’ which astronomers see as the dusky body of a pillar, that point away from the brilliant stars.
VLT’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument has now helped illustrate the ongoing evaporation of the Pillars of Creation in detail.
MUSE has shown that the tip of the left pillar is facing us, atop a pillar that is actually situated behind NGC 6611, unlike the other pillars.
This tip is bearing the brunt of the radiation from NGC 6611’s stars, and as a result looks brighter to our eyes than the bottom left, middle and right pillars, whose tips are all pointed away from our view.
This visualization of the 3D structure of the Pillars of Creation is based on new observations of the object using VLT’s MUSE instrument. Image credit: ESO / M. Kornmesser.
The study, published online in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (arXiv.org preprint), also reports evidence for two gestating stars in the left and middle pillars as well as a jet from a young star that had escaped attention up to now.
For more stars to form in environments like the Pillars of Creation, it is a race against time as intense radiation from the powerful stars that are already shining continues to grind away at the pillars.
By measuring the Pillars of Creation’s rate of evaporation, MUSE has given the team a time frame for when the pillars will be no more.
According to the astronomers, the Pillars of Creation have an expected lifetime of perhaps 3 million more years.
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A.F. McLeod et al. 2015. The Pillars of Creation revisited with MUSE: gas kinematics and high-mass stellar feedback traced by optical spectroscopy. MNRAS 450 (1): 1057-1076; doi: 10.1093/mnras/stv680
