NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope never ceases to amaze us with the incredible shots it has taken, and this time will be no exception. It recently managed to capture a dazzling landscape of the Pillars of Creation, where stars form within clouds of gas and dust. These three-dimensional pillars appear to be rock formations, but they are much more ethereal, consisting of cold interstellar gas and dust that appears semi-transparent in near-infrared light.
The Pillars of Creation
The Pillars of Creation were discovered in 1995 when NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope first photographed them in visible light. Since then they have become emblematic among cosmic images, and now Webb has managed to capture them in unprecedented detail.
The iconic rock pillar-like formations lie within the Eagle Nebula 6,500 light-years away from Earth. This image revealed three giant columns of cold gas covered by ultraviolet light surrounded by massive young stars.
[Pillars of Creation taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014.]
In the year 2014 a second photograph after the one from 1995, was taken again offering new details thanks to its sharper and wider resolution suggesting that they could also be called the “pillars of destruction.”
Images captured by Webb
The bright red orbs usually have diffraction spikes and are found outside one of the dust pillars. When knots of sufficient mass form inside these, they begin to collapse under their own gravity, gradually heat up, and eventually form new stars. The new stars are the main observation in the photograph captured by NASA’s Webb, captured by the space telescope’s near-infrared camera (NIRCam).
Some wavy lines can also be observed at the edges of the pillars, which are ejections of stars that are still in the process of forming in the gas and dust. The process happens because the young stars periodically launch supersonic jets that collide with the pillars, sometimes this causes bow shocks, forming wavy patterns, as a boat would do when moving through water. In addition, their crimson glow is possible because of the energetic hydrogen molecules that result from the jets and shocks.
It appears that Webb’s infrared light has made it through the clouds, revealing cosmic distances beyond the pillars where galaxies can be seen. But the truth is that the view is blocked by the interstellar medium, which is a mixture of gas and translucent dust in the densest part of our Milky Way.
The infrared image shows the pillars in an eerie and faint silhouette against their star-filled background. This is possible because the infrared light penetrates the gas and dust, except for the densest regions of the pillars, and it is within them that new stars are observed. These young stars are thought to be only a few hundred thousand years old.
The new observation through the James Webb telescope will help researchers revamp star formation models by allowing them to identify more accurate counts of newly formed stars and how they burst into dusty clouds in that region over the years.
Story originally published in Spanish in Ecoosfera