NASA’s most eagle-eyed observatory to date has done it again. The James Webb Space Telescope has returned an image of the famous “Pillars of Creation” in infrared light that is the sharpest and most detailed portrait of the spectacular star-forming region ever seen.
The ethereal scene captures translucent columns of cold interstellar gas and dust punctuated by piercing, bright points of light. Most of these are stars, and the reddish fireballs near the edges of the pillars are newly forming stars, according to NASA.
Don’t confuse them with the deep red, magma-like areas along the inner perimeter of some of the pillars. This is created by the churning of stars that are still forming and throwing supersonic jets of material into space where they collide with other material. In short, this is what cosmic chaos looks like.
Fortunately, these epic explosions and cosmological collisions are far away, at a distance of about 6,500 light years from Earth.
This region of the universe first rose to fame in 1995 when it was photographed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. In 2014, Hubble ran a follow-up campaign, and many other observatories have also trained their lenses on the area inside the Eagle Nebula.
A 2014 image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on the left, next to the new Webb Telescope image.
NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Hubble Heritage Project/Joseph DePasquale/Anton M. Koekemoer/Alyssa Pagan
A side-by-side comparison of the new image and Hubble’s view of the cosmic phenomenon reveals how Webb’s infrared instrument is able to peer through the curtains of dust and gas surrounding the scene.
NASA and astronomers around the world will be looking to images like these and more data from Webb to gain a better understanding of the star formation process.
For the rest of us, it’s a sweet treat just in time for Halloween.