Pillars of creation seen by James Webb reveal details never seen before!
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NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured one of the most stunning images yet; it's
the lush and highly detailed landscape of the iconic Pillars of Creation, a place where
new stars form within immense clouds of gas and dust.
Want to know what he's discovered?
Ready, let's start!
The pillars of creation are a star formation composed mainly of dust and gas; these are
so named because of their peculiar pillars shape that extends into a vacuum full of stars.
Although the pillars seen in 3D look like majestic rock formations, they are semitransparent
clouds.
These columns are made up of cold interstellar gas and dust that sometimes appear semitransparent
in near-infrared light; the pillars of creation are dust that moves and expands; these are
located within the eagle nebula, which lies within the constellation Serpens.
These cannot be seen with the naked eye or with amateur telescopes.
To see them, it is necessary to use professional telescopes, which is why the Hubble Space
Telescope captured the first images we obtained of this formation.
First images The first time the Hubble telescope captured
detailed images of the pillars of creation was in the visible light spectrum, where dark
clouds surrounded by a greenish gas could be seen, giving the impression that it is
a science fiction landscape.
Years later, with the help of the Very Large Telescope (VLT), another image of the same
region was taken, but this time in the infrared light spectrum, using the VLT's ISAAC camera;
in this new image, it was possible to see the first time a vast number of stars that
were hidden by gas and dust.
Thanks to this, it was discovered that this area was a "star nursery," a place where gas
and stellar dust accumulate by the effects of gravity to create new stars like the sun,
hence the name of this formation, pillars of CREATION.
In 1995 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope,
astronomers took a more significant, higher-resolution photograph of the Pillars of Creation, unveiled
in January 2015 at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.
The image was imaged by Hubble's Wide-Angle Camera 3, installed in 2009, and produced
using exposure to near-infrared and visible light.
This image captured more details of the nebula in its central gas formation and brighter
stars.
However, all these images taken by the Hubble telescope pale compared to the new image just
taken by James Webb.
The Great Revelation This is the image taken by James Webb, a fantastic
landscape full of colors and thousands of stars that steal the scene with their intense
brightness.
Here it is in maximum resolution The image was captured with James Webb's near-infrared
camera (NIRCam).
In this new image, bright red orbs are captured; these are located on the peaks or edges of
the dusty pillars.
When knots of gas and dust with enough mass form inside the pillars, they begin to collapse
by their gravity, slowly heat up, and eventually form new stars.
You can appreciate several areas where stars are forming just now, without a doubt, a fascinating
spectacle.
What about those wavy lines that look like lava on the edges of some pillars?
These are ejections of stars still forming inside the gas and dust.
Newly formed young stars periodically release supersonic jets that collide with clouds of
material, which form these thick pillars.
Sometimes this also results in bow shocks, forming wavy patterns like a boat does when
moving through water.
The crimson glow of clouds comes from energetic hydrogen molecules that result from jets and
shocks.
This is evident in the second and third pillars of the image (They are the two most enormous
pillars).
It is estimated that these young stars are only a few hundred thousand years old.
Although it may appear that near-infrared light has allowed Webb to "traverse" clouds
to reveal vast cosmic distances beyond the pillars, there are almost no galaxies in sight.
Instead, there is a mixture of translucent gas and dust known as the interstellar medium
in the densest part of our galaxy's disk, the Milky Way, which blocks our view of much
of the deeper universe.
Although Hubble had already photographed this scene in 1995, it is possible to compare both
images and verify their differences.
Place this image: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/stsci-01gfnr1kzzp67ffgv8y26kr0vw.png The main difference is that the image obtained
by Hubble lacks stars in the foreground; this is because most of the stars are behind the
clouds; this causes visible light to be absorbed by dust and cannot be seen with the naked
eye; the only way is to observe it with infrared light.
James Webb has a powerful infrared camera, the NIRCam, which can see through the clouds
of dust, and thanks to this, it managed to capture all those invisible stars to Hubble.
Although James Webb has managed to capture more details in infrared, it does not mean
that the Hubble image isn´t useful; on the contrary, the Hubble image gives us details
in the dust clouds that James Webb cannot generate, which is why the information from
both telescopes serves for scientists to perform better research working hand in hand with
the two telescopes.
It should also be remembered that James Webb and Hubble are not the only telescopes in
the world, there are different astronomical observatories all over the planet, and each
advanced instrument offers researchers new details about this region, which is practically
full of stars.
Do the pillars no longer exist?
In 2015 astronomer Paul Scowen of Arizona State University in Tempe, says that the pillars
of creation are also pillars of destruction as they are being actively removed before
our eyes.
The ghostly bluish haze around the dense edges of the pillars is material that heats up and
evaporates in space, which is why, according to Scowen, we have been fortunate to be able
to capture these pillars at a unique and short-lived moment in their evolution, as they will eventually
cease to exist.
When the pillars are observed in infrared light, it is possible to smoke fragments that
have heated up and fly out of the structure, underscoring the violent nature of the star-forming
regions.
These pillars represent a dynamic and active process since the gas is not heating passively
and floating smoothly into space.
Otherwise, the gaseous pillars are ionizing, a process by which electrons are stripped
from atoms and heated by radiation from massive stars.
Then they are eroded by solid star winds and the barrage of charged particles, which wipe
out jets of dust on top of these pillars; in other words, they are self-destructing.
At these points, the stars are young and still "harmless,": but when they grow more, their
radiation will be more powerful and eventually evaporate the gas and dust around them, making
the Pillars of Creation disappear.
Those summits, on which some bulges are bigger than the entire solar system, are evaporating
because of the flux of ultraviolet radiation.
In 2009, infrared images captured by the Spitzer Space Telescope detected what appeared to
be a shock front generated by a supernova.
As astronomer Nicolas Flagey suggested, this could indicate that the wave of the violent
outburst would have destroyed the entire dust cloud of the Pillars of Creation millennia
ago.
The pillars of creation are 6500 light years from us; this means that when we observe this
structure, we see it as it was 6500 years ago, not as it is today.
This is due to the nature of light, it is moving at 300,000 km / h, but even with that
speed, it takes a long time to travel the immense space.
That is why the light of the pillars of creation that comes to us is the one that departed
6500 years ago, and today's light will reach the earth in 6500 years.
If this supernova destroyed the pillars of creation, we will see that outcome for up
to 6500 years from now, although astronomers have suggested that this destruction would
be more gradual.
We would begin to see it several millennia earlier.
The famous Hubble photo and the image captured by James Webb are authentic relics of the
past.
Of a very remote one that probably no longer exists.