The James Webb Telescope reveals a new view of the pillars of creation

Nearly 30 years ago, the Pillars of Creation astounded the astronomy world when they were captured by NASA’s famous Hubble Space Telescope.

Now a new generation can enjoy a fresh look at the haunting landscape after the US space agency’s $10 billion (£7.4 billion) James Webb Hyperspace Telescope captured the same tendrils of gas and dust.

Resembling a ghostly hand, the Pillars of Creation are part of the Eagle Nebula – located 6,500 light-years from Earth – and are known to be a source of star formation.

This week NASA and the European Space Agency revealed another look at Webb’s sharp eye plumes.

The latest image was taken in mid-infrared light, which obscures the brightness of stars to capture only the outflow of gas and dust. This provided a new way to experience and understand the amazing composition.

Webb has instruments that see in different wavelengths of infrared light.

In October, experts released an image of the Creation Pillars from the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), before following up with an image from the Medium Infrared Instruments (MIRI).

They’ve now stitched the images together to produce a haunting image that shows off the best of both views, showing bright edges of dust where young stars are just beginning to form.

NIRCam reveals newly formed stars orange outside the pillars, while MRI shows layers of dust forming.

“This is one of the reasons why the region is filled with stars – dust is a key element in star formation,” NASA said.

The bright red fingertips on the second column indicate active star formation, but the stars are just babies—NASA estimates they are only 100,000 years old.

It takes millions of years to fully form.

“By combining images of the iconic Pillars of Creation from two cameras aboard NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the cosmos is framed in infrared glory,” Webb’s team writes.

They said it “has lit up this star-forming region with new detail.”

When knots of gas and dust of sufficient mass form at the poles, they begin to collapse under their own gravity, slowly heating up and eventually forming new stars.

“Newly formed stars are especially visible at the edges of the two upper pillars – they practically do,” Webb’s team said.

Almost everything you see in this scene is local.

The distant universe is largely obscured from our view by the interstellar medium, which consists of gas and dust scattered between the stars and a thick layer of dust in our galaxy, the Milky Way.

As a result, stars take center stage in the web show Pillars of Creation.

The Pillars of Creation are located in the constellation of the Serpent.

This cluster contains a hot young star cluster, NGC6611, visible with modest telescopes in the back garden, which carves out and illuminates the surrounding gas and dust, producing huge holes and hollow pillars, each several light-years away.

An image taken by Hubble in 1995 indicated that new stars were being born inside the pillars. Because of the dust blockage, the Hubble Space Telescope’s visible-light image was unable to see inside and prove that young stars were forming.

So NASA brought Hubble back for a second visit, allowing them to compare the two snapshots.

Astronomers have noticed changes in the jet-like characteristic as it drifts away from one of the newborn stars within the pillars.

The jet has grown 60 billion miles in length between observations, indicating that the material in the jet was traveling at about 450,000 miles per hour.