To celebrate the Hubble’s 25th year in space, Nasa has revisited the telescope’s most iconic image, the so-called “Pillars of Creation”.
The original image, taken in 1995, revealed never-before-seen details of three giant columns of cold gas bathed in the scorching ultraviolet light from a cluster of young, massive stars in a small region of the Eagle Nebula, or M16.
The new images, unveiled at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, offer a sharper and wider view of the pillars, with the structures captured in both visible light and near-infrared, which transforms the pillars into eerie, wispy silhouettes seen against a background of myriad stars.
Paul Scowen of Arizona State University in Tempe, co-lead on the original Hubble observations of the pillars, said:
“I’m impressed by how transitory these structures are. They are actively being ablated away before our very eyes. The ghostly bluish haze around the dense edges of the pillars is material getting heated up and evaporating away into space. We have caught these pillars at a very unique and short-lived moment in their evolution.”
