"Inside the Image: Hubble Space Telescope"
"The Eagle Nebula"
This is a region of interstellar space,
gas and dust in our own Milky Way galaxy.
That's part of a nebula we call the Eagle Nebula.
6,500 light years away from us
in the Serpens constellation.
These prominent
and now famous pillars are sometimes called the Pillars of Creation
because they're actually a region where new stars are still forming.
So what we can see in this region is the effects of stars
that have already formed lighting up and ionizing this background wispy gas
and the environment where new stars are still in the process of forming
buried in the dense remaining columns of dust.
We see some of these hot spots
that are right in the region of a protostar that's forming
at the tips of these columns and then down
through the columns. There's one there and another one down here.
As you look carefully,
you can see these regions where the protostars, as they coalesce,
are heating the surrounding dust cocoon right around them.
But in this visible light picture, we can't see into the dust
to really see what's going on deep inside the cloud.
This is also an image
of the Eagle Nebula taken with the Hubble Space Telescope.
However, this image is dramatically different
from what we see in visible light because the infrared channel on the Wide
Field Camera 3 allows us to peer through
a lot of that dust that blocks the visible light.
And so instead of seeing all the structure of the pillars, that the visible light
image allows us to see, this infrared view allows us to see through
some of that dust and we can actually see into those pillars.
And then you'll also notice we see a lot more stars
over the whole field because the whole field has a lot of dust.
But we can see through it with this infrared view.
And so we see many stars in the field that are already formed.
We see regions
where new stars are coalescing and heating up within these dense pillars.
And it gives us information
that complements what we can see in the visible light image.
The whole region is somewhat ethereal because we see dust,
we see gas, we see this lit up region in the background,
symphony of color and structure
and interaction going on in this region.
I think it's why we never really get tired of looking at it.
"The Eagle Nebula, Pillars of Creation"
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