January 7, 2015

New images from the Hubble Space Telescope show the Pillars of Creation in the turbulent Eagle Nebula in even sharper detail. The original image of the Pillars, taken in 1995, may be the most famous of all the astonishing images of space objects captured by the orbiting telescope. The new image was made using a wide-field camera that was installed on Hubble on 2009. The camera produces images with twice the resolution of the camera that made the original image.

The Eagle Nebula, which is some 7,000 light-years away, is an open cluster of stars with several areas of active star formation, including the Pillars of Creation. The Pillars are actually columns of cool interstellar hydrogen gas and dust. In the new false-color image (above, right), areas giving off oxygen are blue; areas giving off sulfur are orange; and areas giving off hydrogen and nitrogen are green. (NASA, ESA, STScI, and J. Hester and P. Scowen (Arizona State University); NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

The nebula got its nickname because of the high rate at which stars are being born there. “These pillars represent a very dynamic, active process,” said Paul Scowen of Arizona State University in Tempe, who, with astronomer Jeff Hester, formerly of Arizona State University, led the original Hubble observations of the Eagle Nebula. “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 (barrage of charged particles), which are sandblasting away the tops of these pillars.”

In another new Hubble image of the Pillars, taken in near-infrared light, the objects appear in silhouette. The bluish haze around the dense edges of the Pillars is material getting heated up by the intense ultraviolet radiation from a cluster of young, massive stars and evaporating away into space. (NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Scowen noted that the sun formed as part of a cluster that included stars massive enough to produce powerful ionizing radiation, like those in the Eagle Nebula. “What that means is when you look at the environment of the Eagle Nebula or other star-forming regions, you’re looking at exactly the kind of nascent environment that our Sun formed in,” he said.

Additional World Book articles:

• Astronomy
• Astronomy Through a Millennium (a special report)
• Seeing the Universe in a Different Light (a special report)
• The Universe on the Grand Scale (a special report)
• Telescopes: 400 Years of Stargazing (a special report)