The pillars are dense clouds of hydrogen and dust.
It’s a classic, one of the most beautiful sights in the cosmos, and now the James Webb Space Telescope has visited it once more.
The so-called “Pillars of Creation” are dense clouds of hydrogen and dust in the constellation Serpens, regarding 6,500 light-years from Earth.
Every major telescope has captured this scene, with the most famous images from the Hubble Observatory in 1995 and 2014.
The James Webb offers us yet another incredible perspective.
The pillars are at the heart of what astronomers call Messier 16 (M!6), or the eagle nebula.
This is an active region of star creation.
Webb, with his infrared detectors, is able to see beyond the light-scattering effects of pillar dust to examine the activity of newborn suns.
“I’ve been studying the Eagle Nebula since the mid-1990s, trying to see ‘inside’ the pillars that Hubble showed, looking for new stars within them,” Professor Mark McCaughrean, senior science adviser for NASA, told the BBC. the European Space Agency.
“I always knew that when the James Webb took pictures of them, they would be stunning. And they are.”
Hubble (left) and Webb (right): The new telescope’s infrared detectors can see beyond the dust of the pillars.
The pillars of the M16 are illuminated and sculpted by the intense ultraviolet light from huge nearby stars. Radiation also dismantles towers.
If you might magically move to this location today, the pillars would most likely not be there anymore.
We only see them because we are looking at them in the past. The light detected by the James Webb telescope has taken 6,500 years to reach its mirrors.
The James Webb is a collaborative project of the US, European and Canadian space agencies. It was launched in December last year and is considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.
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