NASA’s Webb Takes Star-Filled Portrait of Pillars of Creation

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured an abundant, highly detailed landscape of the iconic Pillars of Creation, where new stars are forming within dense clouds of gas and dust. The three-dimensional pillars look like great rock origination but are far more permeable. These columns are made up of cool interplanetary space gas and dust that appear at times semi-transparent in near-infrared light. This is a region where young stars are forming or have hardly burst from their dusty cocoons as they continue to form.

The Pillars of Creation are set off in a kaleidoscope of color in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared-light view.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI). 

Webb’s new view of the Pillars of Creation, which were first made famous when imaged by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, will help researchers renovate their models of star formation by identifying far more accurate counts of newly formed stars, along with the volume of gas and dust in the region. They will begin to build a clearer understanding of how stars form and crack out of these dusty clouds over millions of years.

Newly formed stars are the scene-stealers in this image from James Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). These are the bright red orbs that typically have diffraction spikes and lie outside one of the dusty pillars. When knots with an adequate mass form within the pillars of gas and dust, they begin to fall in under their own gravity, slowly heat up, and eventually form new stars.

What about those wavy lines that look like lava at the edges of some pillars? 

These are ejections from stars still forming within the gas and dust. Young stars periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, like these thick pillars. This sometimes also results in bow shocks, which can form wavy patterns. The crimson glow comes from the energetic hydrogen molecules that result from jets and shocks. This is evident in the second and third pillars from the top the NIRCam image is practically pulsing with their activity. According to estimation, these young stars are only a few hundred thousand years old.

Although it may appear that near-infrared light has allowed James Webb to “stick through” the clouds to disclose great cosmic distances beyond the pillars, there are almost no galaxies in this view. Instead, a mix of semi-transparent gas and dust known as the interstellar medium in the densest part of our Milky Way galaxy’s disk blocks our view of much of the deeper universe.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope made the Pillars of Creation famous with its first image in 1995 but revisited the scene in 2014 to reveal a sharper, wider view in visible light, shown above at left. A new, near-infrared-light view from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, at right, helps us peer through more of the dust in this star-forming region. The thick, dusty brown pillars are no longer as opaque, and many more red stars that are still forming come into view.

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI).

This scene was first imaged by Hubble in 1995 and recaptured in 2014, but many other observatories have also stared intensely at this region. Each advanced instrument offers researchers new details about this region, which is practically overflowing with stars.

This tightly cropped image is set within the vast Eagle Nebula, which lies 6,500 light-years away.