Some 6,500 light years away, an epic race is coming to an end.
This terrestrial wide-angle image of the Eagle Nebula shows the star-forming region in all its glory, with new stars, the blue glow of reflected starlight, and the red glow of ionized everyone present. The dusty elements that block the light are also prominent. The reddish glow at the gaseous edges is the result of the recombination of hydrogen atoms, and every time an electron transitions from the n=3 to n=2 energy state, a photon of exactly 656.3 nanometers is emitted.
Inside the Eagle Nebula, the last reserves of neutral gas now face evaporation.
A large portion of the Eagle Nebula with four iconic Hubble Space Telescope images superimposed over the relevant region of the larger nebula. Although these features, highlighted by the central Pillars of Creation, are incredibly interesting because of the neutral matter still present, most of the nebula is instead simply empty, a cavernous void dotted with isolated stars and star clusters.
It lies in the plane of the Milky Way, and new stars are formed when cold gas collapses.
The dense cores of the protostellar cluster G333.23–0.06, as identified by ALMA, show strong evidence for large levels of multiplicity in these cores. Binary cores are common, and groups of multiple binaries that form quaternary systems are also quite common. Triplet and quintuple systems are also found inside, while singlet stars have proven to be relatively rare for these high-mass clusters. Stars forming in nebulae throughout the Universe, including the Eagle Nebula, are expected to have similar clustering properties.
This collapse leads to fragmentation and eventually the formation of new star systems.
Chandra’s unique ability to distinguish and locate X-ray sources has made it possible to identify hundreds of very young stars and stars still in the process of formation (known as “protostars”). Infrared observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory show that 219 X-ray sources in the Eagle Nebula are young stars surrounded by disks of dust and gas, and 964 are young stars without these disks: altogether more than 1,000 new stars and protostars have been found. And no, there were no signs of recent supernovae or supernova remnants being discovered; The pillars are not in the process of being destroyed.
However, young stars are hot and violent: they emit enormous amounts of ultraviolet radiation.
Over the course of 27 years, our view of the Pillars of Creation has expanded not only in size and resolution, but also in wavelength coverage. Longer wavelengths of light, as revealed in JWST’s unprecedented resolution, allow us to see features that could never be exposed by an optical telescope, let alone one in space, by themselves. We can also say, although the effect is subtle, that the Pillars are slowly evaporating and that after about 100,000 years they will be completely gone.
These photons ionize atoms, turning them into plasma and cooking them away.
This Herschel image of the Eagle Nebula shows the thermal emission of gas and dust from the intensely cool nebula, which can only be captured by far-infrared views. Each color shows a different dust temperature, from about 10 degrees above absolute zero (10 Kelvin or minus 442 degrees Fahrenheit) for red to about 40 Kelvin or minus 388 degrees Fahrenheit for blue. The Pillars of Creation, identifiable just below and to the left of center, are among the hottest parts of the nebula as revealed by these wavelengths.
Most of the Eagle Nebula, once a large cloud of gas, is now cavernous.
Using Chandra, scientists have detected over 1,700 X-ray sources in the Eagle Nebula field. Two-thirds of these sources are probably young stars located in the nebula, and some of them are visible in this small field of view around the Pillars of Creation. Although most of the sources do not come from inside the pillars themselves, the “eye” of the largest pillar corresponds to a protostar with a mass of about 5 times the mass of the Sun. The columns themselves represent some of the last stores of gas in the nebula’s interior that have not yet been fully photoevaporated.
The interior is dominated by massive, newborn star systems, leaving a few scattered regions of gas.
This three-panel view of the central pillar in Pillars of Creation shows how our views of it have evolved from the 1995 Hubble image to the 2014 Hubble image to the 2022 JWST image. The level of detail seen in the pillar’s dust composition is particularly striking, as are the background stars revealed by JWST that are completely obscured to Hubble’s eyes. The color differences between the first two and the third panel near the top of the column provide evidence of energy transfer within the column itself.
Three towering pillars still remain, about 4-5 light years tall: the Pillars of Creation.
On the left is the iconic view of the Pillars of Creation as seen by Hubble. Starting in 2022, JWST (right) also looked at the pillars, revealing details such as newly forming stars, faint protostars and cool gas that are invisible even to Hubble’s impressive capabilities.
Observations from 1995 to the present show that the Pillars are slowly shrinking: they are evaporating from external radiation.
By rotating and stretching two iconic high-resolution Hubble images of the tip of the tallest pillar relative to each other, the changes from 1995 to 2015 can be overlaid. Contrary to what many expected, the evaporation process is slow and small, suggesting that the pillars persist for ~100,000 years or more .
X-rays and infrared light reveal the presence of young, newly forming stars within.
This infrared view of the Pillars of Creation from ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the 8.2-metre ground-based telescope, peers largely through the dust of the Pillars of Creation to reveal the stars forming inside. The JWST views are at similar wavelengths, but are much higher resolution, much more detailed, and cover a much larger range of wavelengths.
Without evidence of a recent supernova, these structures face a losing end.
This colorful view of the Pillars of Creation uses a large JWST data set that shows the subtle and transient nature of these neutral gas elements.
Internal and external radiation will boil off the last gas stores after ~100,000 years.
This infrared, multi-channel composite view from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, taken in 2007, reveals the “pillars of creation” on the right and the “faith” or “fairy” on the left, similar to the iconic features detected by Hubble in optical wavelengths. JWST has yet to image the fairy, but its dense central core of gas may yet survive the neutral matter present in the pillars.
The heaviest and most massive clusters will become full stars.
Taken by JWST’s NIRCam image, this small region of the Orion Nebula shows not only stars and gas and dust, but also planetary-mass objects, five of which are surprisingly found in binary pairs. They are known as JuMBOs (Jupiter-Mass Binary Objects) and make up about 9% of all planetary mass objects found in the Orion Nebula. Even though the Pillars of Creation are about five times as far away, similar physics and similar objects should be present and in play.
“Failed stars” such as brown dwarfs and Jupiter-like worlds also form in abundance.
This 3D visualization of the location and properties of the feature that appears as the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula actually consists of at least four different, disconnected components that are on either side of a rich star cluster: NGC 6611. The neutral mass both absorbs and reflects stellar light, leading to its unique appearance at optical wavelengths and spectacular views when observed in infrared light by JWST.
Only 5-10% of the original gas becomes stars; the rest will return to interstellar space.
Mostly, Silent Monday tells an astronomical story in images, visuals and no more than 200 words.