The star-studded new image captures the famed pillars in near-infrared light, allowing NASA’s Webb telescope to see thousands of newly-formed stars.
WASHINGTON — NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope has captured a new, highly-detailed view of a famous celestial spot, the Pillars of Creation.
The Pillars of Creation were first made famous by the images from NASA’s Hubble Telescope in 1995. NASA shared a new series of Hubble images of the Pillars of Creation again in 2014.
In the new images, the towers of swirling celestial gas look similar to the earlier photos, but using near-infrared light the pillars become far less opaque and the Webb telescope is able to pick up thousands of stars forming beyond the semi-transparent pillars.
The towering Pillars of Creation, which are about 6,500 lightyears from Earth, may look like enormous rock formations, but they are actually made up of dense clouds of cool interstellar gas and dust. New stars form inside those clouds as knots of gas and dust gain enough mass to begin collapsing under their own gravity, heat up and eventually form a star.
The newly-formed stars can be seen in the photos as bright red orbs, typically with diffraction spikes and lie outside the dusty pillars.
Webb’s new imaging will help researchers study how stars are formed and estimate how much dust and gas is in the region far more precisely, NASA said. Over time, scientists will hopefully build a better understanding of how stars burst out these dusty clouds over millions of years.
The wavy lines that look like lava along the edges are ejections from stars that are still forming, NASA said. Young stars “periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, like these thick pillars,” according to NASA. These can result in bow shocks, which form wavy patterns like a boat’s wake.
Some of the young stars in the image are estimated to be only a few hundred thousand years old.
One thing you don’t see in the photo? Galaxies. According to NASA, the translucent gas and dust known as the interstellar medium in the densest part of the Milky Way galaxy’s disk blocks our view of the deeper universe.