NASA Hubble Telescope Captures Spectacular New Image of the 'Pillars of Creation'

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a spectacular new image of the iconic view of the "Pillars of Creation," giant columns of cold gas bathed in the scorching ultraviolet light of young stars. The new image reveals never-before-seen details of the three giant gas columns.

The Pillars of Creation are located in a small region of the Eagle Nebula, also known as M16. While this feature is common in star-forming regions, the M16 structures are by far the most photogenic and evocative. In this case, Hubble took images both in near-infrared light as well as visible light. The infrared view actually transforms the pillars into eerie, wispy silhouettes seen against a background of stars.

"I'm impressed by how transitory these structures are," said Paul Scowen, one of the researchers, in a news release. "They are actively being ablated away before our very eyes. The ghostly bluish haze around the dense edges of the pillars is material heated up and evaporating away into space. We have caught these pillars at a very unique and short-lived moment of their evolution."

The infrared pictures actually show that the very ends of the pillars are dense knots of gas and dust, and they shadow the gas below them, creating the long, column-like structures. The gas in between the pillars has long since been blown away by ionizing winds from the central star cluster located above the pillars.

"These pillars represent a very dynamic, active process," said Scowen. "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."

The researchers also noticed that there's been a lengthening of a narrow jet-like feature that may have been ejected from a newly forming star. The jet looks a bit like a stream from a garden hose.

The findings reveal a bit more about this unusual feature. This, in turn, may tell us a bit more about the environment in which our own sun formed.

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