The Pillars of Creation, located in the Eagle Nebula, 6,500 light-years away, are the protagonists of the latest image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. “A lush and highly detailed landscape,” considers NASA, in which the columns that form the “three-dimensional pillars” contain “interstellar gases and dust that sometimes appear semi-transparent in near-infrared light.”
According to the US space agency, the new image shows “new stars forming within dense clouds of gas and dust.”
“Webb’s new insight into the Pillars of Creation, first made famous when they were launched by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, will help researchers update their models of star formation, identifying counts much More precise images of newly formed stars, along with the amounts of gas and dust in the region. Over time, they will begin to build a clearer understanding of how stars form and explode in these dust clouds over millions of years.” can be read in the NASA statement.
Newly formed stars are the protagonists of this image from Webb’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam). You can see “bright red orbs that normally have diffraction spikes that are outside of one of the dust pillars. When nodes within the gas and dust pillars begin to collapse under their own gravity, they slowly heat up and eventually form new stars,” he explains. POT.
Wavy lines at the ends of some pillars are “projections of stars still forming within gas and dust.”
“Young stars, estimated to be only a few hundred thousand years old, periodically fire off supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, sometimes also resulting in shock waves, which can form wavy patterns, like “What a ship does when it moves through the water. The crimson glow comes from the energetic hydrogen molecules that result from the jets and shocks. This is evident in the second and third pillars from the top,” he says.
NASA further maintains that “there are no galaxies in this view”, noting that “a mixture of translucent gas and dust, known as the interstellar medium in the densest part of the Milky Way’s disk, blocks our view of the deeper universe. “.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope made the Pillars of Creation famous with the first image in 1995, revising the scene in 2014 to “reveal a wider, sharper view in visible light.”
The James Webb Telescope, a $10 billion project named after a former NASA administrator, was sent into space on December 25, after successive delays, on a European-made rocket. It is in orbit 1.5 million kilometers from Earth and aims to solve mysteries of our solar system and investigate the origins of the Universe. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
Source: TSF
