The James Webb Space Telescope has glimpsed the dark side of the usually ethereal Pillars of Creation, located 6,500 light-years away in the Eagle Nebula.
Last week, NASA revealed?that the James Webb Space Telescope had photographed the iconic “Pillars of Creation,” enormous formations of gas and dust packed with stars.
The first image taken by the telescope of the massive gold, copper, and brown columns standing in the middle of the cosmos is illuminated by the flashing of thousands of stars.
Numerous pillars have brilliant red, lava-like patches at their ends. These are ejections from young stars that are only a few hundred thousand years old, according to a statement from NASA.
The US space agency noted that these “young stars periodically blast out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, resembling these thick pillars.”
The “Pillars of Creation” are located 6,500 light years away from Earth, in the Eagle Nebula of the Milky Way galaxy.
The Hubble Space Telescope initially photographed the pillars in 1995 and then again in 2014, making them famous.
The more recent telescope, Webb, was sent into orbit less than a year ago and can see past the pillars’ opacity to see countless new stars developing.
According to Klaus Pontoppidan, the science program manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute, “by popular demand, we had to conduct the Pillars of Creation” with Webb.?Webb is run by STScI out of Baltimore, Maryland. There are simply a ton of stars! Added Pontoppidan.
The image was captured by Webb’s primary imager, NIRCam, which records near-infrared wavelengths that are undetectable to the human eye and covers a radius of nearly eight light years.
Visible light has been used to “transform” the image’s colours.
The new image, according to NASA, “will aid researchers in revising their models of star formation by detecting far more specific counts of freshly created stars, as well as the quantities of gas and dust in the region.”
The most potent space telescope ever created, Webb has been in operation since July and has already released an abundance of unheard-of data. The goal is that it will usher in a new era of discovery.