One of the most famous, awe-inspiring images of modern astronomy, showing giant spiers of interstellar gas and dust known as the Pillars of Creation, was released by the Space Telescope. James Webb time renders again with greater depth, clarity and color.
The new view of the pillars, made famous for the first time when captured by Webb’s predecessor observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, was released by NASA on Wednesday, three months after the first series of space images by NASA Webb is published when it is fully operational.
The mesmerizing images show giant, towering columns of dense clouds of gas and dust where young stars are forming in a region of the Eagle Nebula, in the constellation Serpens, about a distance from Earth. 6,500 light years.
This image has become a worldwide cultural phenomenon, embodied in everyday objects, from t-shirts to coffee mugs.
Revisited with Hubble’s visible light optics to produce a sharper, wider scene in 2014, the pillars were shown by Webb in the near-infrared spectrum with even greater translucency , yielding more stars while revealing new contours of gas-and-dust clouds.
NASA said in the document accompanying the latest image, the new perspective “will help researchers improve their star formation models by determining a much more precise number of newly formed stars.” , along with the amount of gas and dust in the area”.
According to NASA, the bright red orbs that appear just outside the pillars are infant stars, where massive clumps of gas and dust collapse under their own gravity and slowly heat up, producing new stellar bodies.
The US space agency says the crimson ripples that look like lava at the edges of some pillars are ejections of matter from stars still forming inside gas and dust, and estimates only a few hundred thousand years old.
Nearly two decades into the contract building of aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp., the US $9 billion Webb infrared telescope was launched into space on December 25, 2021, in partnership with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
It reached its destination in solar orbit nearly a million miles from Earth a month later and is expected to revolutionize astronomy by allowing scientists to observe farther before and with greater precision. more precisely into the universe, to the dawn of the known universe.
