The ‘James Webb’ reveals new details of the ‘Pillars of Creation’
The new telescope’s spectacular images improve on those taken by Hubble revealing new details making further study of the formation possible.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured stunning images of the Pillars of Creation, a place where new stars form within dense clouds of gas and dust . Specifically, the Pillars of Creation are in the constellation Serpens, about 6,500 light years from Earth.
The first time this phenomenon was photographed was in 1995 through NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The Pillars of Creation were photographed again in 2014, but the Webb images show them in more detail thanks to its infrared detectors, which allow you to see through space dust and examine the activity of newborn suns. The following image compares the photograph captured by Hubble in 2014 and the one taken by Webb a few days ago.
“I’ve been studying the Eagle Nebula since the mid-1990s, trying to see ‘inside’ the light-years long pillars that Hubble showed, searching for young stars inside them. I always knew that when James Webb took pictures of it, they would be stunning. And so they are,” enthused Professor Mark McCaughrean, senior science adviser at the European Space Agency, speaking to the BBC.
But the Pillars of Creation are pure nostalgia. They don’t exist, but they did exist, because the phenomenon is so far away that the light collected by the James Webb was emitted 6,500 years ago. We see it now, in the present, and NASA hopes it will serve the future, but it is only a vestige of space’s past.
newborn protostars
The images are still amazing. The wavy lava-like lines at the edges of the pillars are “ejections from stars that are still forming within the gas and dust,” NASA notes, while the bright red orb-shaped dots are newly formed protostars. The crimson glow that can be seen comes from the hydrogen molecules generated by the collisions between the material in the environment (dust and gas) and the jets that are being spit out by the young stars that are forming.
Although it appears that the telescope’s infrared technology has made it possible to peer deeper into the clouds to see what is behind the pillars, there is no galaxy in the photograph taken. To build the future, they say, you have to look to the past. Less than a year after its launch, the Webb has already made history.