– One of the most famous, mind-blowing images in modern astronomy, revealing colossal cones of interstellar gas and dust called the Pillars of Creation, has been re-rendered in greater depth, clarity and color by the James Webb Space Telescope.
The new view of the pillars, first made famous when captured in 1995 by the observatory of Webb’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, was unveiled by NASA on Wednesday, three months after Webb’s inaugural batch of cosmic photos was revealed as it began to be fully functional.
The stunning images show huge, towering columns of dense clouds of gas and dust where young stars are forming in a region of the Eagle Nebula in the constellation Serpens, about 6,500 light-years from Earth.
The image became a global cultural phenomenon, emblazoned on everyday items from t-shirts to coffee mugs.
Revised by Hubble’s visible-light optics to create a sharper, wider scene in 2014, the pillars were rendered by Webb in the near-infrared spectrum with even greater transparency, bringing many more stars into view while revealing new outlines of the gas—and – dust clouds.
The new view “will help researchers refresh their star formation models by pinpointing much more precisely the numbers of newly formed stars, along with the amounts of gas and dust in the region,” NASA said in material accompanying the latest image.
The bright red orbs that appear just outside the pillars are infant stars, where huge knots of gas and dust have collapsed under their own gravity and are slowly heating up, giving birth to new stellar bodies, according to NASA.
The wavy crimson lines that look like lava at the edge of some pillars are ejecta of matter from stars still forming in the gas and dust and are estimated to be only a few hundred thousand years old, the US space agency said.
Nearly two decades into the contract for NASA from aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp, the $9 billion Webb infrared telescope launched into space on December 25, 2021, in partnership with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
It arrived at its solar-orbiting destination nearly 1 million miles from Earth a month later and is expected to revolutionize astronomy by allowing scientists to peer further and more precisely into the Universe than ever before, until the dawn of the known universe.
