James Webb: The dazzling images of the “Pillars of Creation” taken by the telescope

It’s a classic, one of the most beautiful sights in the universe, and now the James Webb Space Telescope has visited it again. The so-called “Pillars of Creation” are dense clouds of hydrogen and dust in the Serpent constellation, About 6,500 light-years from Earth.

Every major telescope captured this scene, with the most famous images from the Hubble telescope in 1995 and 2014. James Webb gives us another great perspective.

The pillars lie at the heart of what astronomers call Messier 16 (M! 6), or the Eagle Nebula. This is an active star-creation area.

Webb, with its infrared detectors, is able to see beyondLight scattering effects from column dust to be tested Newborn activity.

“I’ve been studying the Eagle Nebula since the mid-1990s, trying to see the plumes shown by Hubble in search of new stars inside them” BBC the teacher Mark McCogrenSenior Science Adviser to the European Space Agency.

“I always knew that when James Webb Take pictures of them, you will be dazzled. And they.” M16 pillars lit and carved by Intense ultraviolet light from nearby massive stars. Radiation also breaks up the towers.

If you could magically navigate to that location today, the columns probably wouldn’t be there anymore. We only see them because We look at them in the past. The light detected by the James Webb Telescope took 6,500 years to reach its mirrors.

James Webb is a collaborative project of the US, European and Canadian space agencies. It was launched in December last year and is considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Strong vision in the infrared spectrum of a space telescope James Webb Discover thousands of stars in the formation stage in the Tarantula Nebula that have not yet been discovered. Within the Large Magellanic Cloud, only 161,000 light-years away, It is the largest star forming region and bright of the Local Group, the closest galaxies to the Milky Way, Which makes it a favorite among astronomers to observe this process.

James Webb, Released December 25, 2021, Point his tools at that nebulaalso called 30 Dorados, where in addition to young stars, Revealed the existence of distant background galaxiesas well as the detailed composition and composition of gas and dust in the nebula.

Image of the nebula taken by the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) Reminiscent of the home of a hiding tarantula, armed with its freedom, as described by the European Space Agency (ESA) that share with NASA The CSA is in the telescope.

The cavity of the nebula that can be seen in the center of the image, Due to the scorching radiation of a group of young, massive starsWhich glows a dull blue.

Only the regions around the denser nebula resist erosion by the strong stellar winds of young stars, and Form columns containing primary formationsthat will come out of its cover to form a nebula.

The near-infrared spectrometer (NIRSpec), for its part, picked up a The star that starts out of its column And it still carried an insulating cloud of dust around it. Without high-resolution Webb spectra with infrared wavelengths, the European Space Agency said, it would not have been possible to detect the star-forming ring in action.

* By Jonathan Amos

BBC World