Hubble photographs the Pillars of Creation

Assembled from 27 blocks · 1 evidence · 20 related

1. Story
2. A Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 mosaic of columns of dust and molecular gas in the Eagle Nebula became one of the most reproduced astronomical images ever made. Its scientific content is the mechanism it shows: the ultraviolet radiation of nearby massive young stars is simultaneously illuminating the columns and photo-evaporating them, exposing dense cores that may or may not survive long enough to form stars. Hubble re-imaged the same region with Wide Field Camera 3 in 2014, and JWST imaged it in the near infrared in 2022, where the dust becomes partly transparent and embedded protostars are visible.
3. Knowledge
4. Giant molecular cloud
5. Eagle Nebula (Messier 16) and the Pillars of Creation
6. Protostar
7. Hubble photographs the Pillars of Creation
8. Connections
9. Eagle Nebula (Messier 16) and the Pillars of Creation
10. Giant molecular cloud
11. Protostar
12. Giant molecular cloud
13. Hubble photographs the Pillars of Creation
14. Eagle Nebula (Messier 16) and the Pillars of Creation
15. Protostar
16. Planetary nebula
17. Supernova
18. The first stars form from metal-free gas
19. The Sun forms and settles onto the main sequence
20. Hubble photographs the Pillars of Creation
21. Initial stellar mass
22. Giant molecular cloud
23. Main sequence (core hydrogen burning)
24. The Sun forms and settles onto the main sequence
25. Hubble photographs the Pillars of Creation
26. Evidence
27. Supports the imaging dates and instruments and the description of the pillars as photo-evaporating columns roughly four to five light-years tall. NASA and STScI domains were blocked by the egress proxy and could not be fetched; the distance is unsettled between about 7,000 and about 5,700 light-years, the latter from a 2019 Gaia-based analysis reported in secondary coverage.