Hits continue to return to Earth from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This time, arriving to help celebrate Halloween, data from the MIRI mid-infrared instrument aboard the JWST shows another view of the Pillars of Creation. Thousands of stars are embedded in these pillars, but many are “invisible” to MIRI.
In the last image, the pillars have a steel gray look about them. They almost look like cosmic tombstones instead of stellar birthplaces. Why is it? Mid-infrared light is an important part of the spectrum for astronomers interested in studying dust clouds. It reveals gas and dust in great detail. The densest areas of dust in the pillars appear as the darkest shades of gray. The upward red V-shaped region is where the dust clouds are thinner and cooler.
At these wavelengths, MIRI can only “see” young stars still buried in their cocoons of gas and dust. They glow a mysterious red – almost like the eyes of pumpkins – at the end of the formations in the pillars. Blue stars are the oldest that broke free and ate their birth clouds.
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The pillars of creation in retrospect
This star birth region has a long history of observations. It is certainly visible to astronomers using garden-type telescopes. However, it takes the Hubble Space Telescope and now JWST to dig into the rich detail of this massive cloud. HST first examined it in 1995, using Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. It returned 32 images, which were combined into a mosaic. The pillars are part of the Eagle Nebula. It is a diffuse emission nebula that covers a region of space approximately 70 x 55 light-years in diameter. It is about 6,500 light years from us. The pillars are part of the nebula, and some of its smaller stellar cradles are larger than our solar system.
When the first HST image appeared, astronomers could see the places where stars are born and eat away at their gas clouds, but couldn’t see INTO the clouds. These starving stellar babies in their cocoons have been dubbed “evaporating gas globules”, or EGGs. They are found in other stellar nurseries, giving astronomers a good idea of how star birth progresses in thick clouds of gas and dust.
The Pillars of Creation have since been imaged by the Chandra X-ray Observatory (which found no X-ray sources associated with newborn stars). The Spitzer Space Telescope has also studied this region of space. He found evidence of hot gases suggesting that a supernova had exploded in the area. If so, there is little evidence that the shock wave harmed stellar hatchlings or evaporated the rest of the cloud.
JWST look at the pillars
The latest steel-gray view of the Pillars of Creation against a brilliant red and gray backdrop isn’t JWST’s first rodeo with this region of space. Earlier in October, the scientific teams published a NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) image of it. This view revealed many protostars forming inside these cosmic stalagtites in space. Thanks to NIRCam, we can see through gas and dust, lifting the veil on the birth of stars.
The protostars seen by NIRCam are those that have multiple diffraction peaks. They’re always accumulating mass, and when they’ve had enough, they’ll collapse under their own gravity and slowly heat up. When they are hot and massive enough, fusion will ignite in their cores. That’s when they become stars. The young stars in these pillars are probably only a few hundred thousand years old and will not finish forming for millions of years.
The stellar birth process often creates jets that shoot out from newborn stars. These jets eat away at the remaining materials of the birth cloud. They sculpt the clouds, which is why the pillars look wavy and distorted.
Understanding star formation from JWST images
These two JWST images of the Pillars of Creation give astronomers a more detailed look at how stars form. While scientists have a pretty good overview of star formation, the intricate details are what they need. All of this data on star birth will help create better models of such an important process.
By examining newborn populations like those in the Pillars and mapping the massive clouds of gas and dust in this region, they will add to knowledge of how stars are born. Images like these also give a good glimpse of what our own region of space must have looked like about five billion years ago. It was then that our own Sun and its stellar siblings began to form from a similar type of cloud of gas and dust.
For more information
Haunting Portrait: Webb Reveals Dust and Structure in Pillars of Creation
Pillars of Creation: Hubble and Web Images Side by Side
Eagle Nebula “Pillars of Creation”
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