The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has shared a new image of the Pillars of Creation captured by the Hubble Space Telescope focusing on the infrared radiation in which the human eyes normally cannot see.
The once colorful Pillar of Creations has now appeared like ghosts behind a kaleidoscope of newborn stars within the dust. The pillars are five light-years in length and has become a natural incubators of star formation due to their dense pockets of hydrogen gas.
Pillars of Creation
The 'Pillars of Creation' was first photographed in 1995 using the Hubble Space Telescope-the same equipment used in capturing its new image surrounded by newborn stars. Located around 6,000 light-years away from Earth, these tendrils of dust and gas have become a Milky Way landmark.
The blue colors seen at the pillars are oxygen, while the red is sulfur, and green represents both hydrogen and nitrogen. The cluster of young stars outside the frame of the pillars bathed it with the scorching ultraviolet light.
The Pillars of Creation is about 4 to 5 light-years and is somewhat small feature of the entire Eagle Nebula that spans between 70 by 55 light-years. It was Jean-Philippe Loys de Chéseaux, a Swiss astronomer who discovered the nebula that is located 7,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens.
Stars destroy the pillars
Now, a new image of the Pillars of Creation shows that the most active star formation glows brightly with a hazy blue radiation that lies in the region of the tip of the biggest pillar. NASA scientists explain that the lower reaches of the pillar were able to maintain their long, stalk-like appearance because these dusty regions shadow and cool the gas below them.
According to Paul Scowen, a NASA astronomer who led the initial Hubble Space telescope exploration of the Eagle Nebula in 1995, the radiation that the stars give off as they become bigger also gets stronger which destroys the gas around them and ultimately the Pillars of Creation.
"The gaseous pillars are actually getting ionized, a process by which electrons are stripped off of atoms, and heated up by radiation from the massive stars. The stars' strong winds and barrage of charged particles are literally sandblasting away the tops of these pillars," Scowen said in a statement in 2015.
Hubble Space Telescope's 30th Anniversary
Originally launched in 1990, the Hubble telescope has made more than 1.4 million observations of many stars, planets and galaxies.
After three decades of capturing some of the most stunning sights in space, this year marks Hubble Space Telescope's 30th anniversary. In celebration of this important milestone, NASA has is giving stargazers around the world the chance to know what the telescope captured during their birthdays.
Just go to the website of NASA and select the month and date of your birthday. You might find something interesting happening in space while you were cutting your birthday cake!
