'Alien Eyes' Revise the "Pillars of Creation" --New Infrared & X-Ray Images

 

             

The Eagle Nebula, 6500 light-years away in the constellation of Serpens, harbors a young hot star cluster, NGC6611, that is sculpting and illuminating the surrounding gas and dust, resulting in a huge hollowed-out cavity and pillars, each several light-years long. The European Space Agency recently captured new images of this enigmatic region using Newton x-ray and Herschel infrared space observatories.

Our human window of vision on the Universe is incredibly limited, within a stunningly small range of wavelengths. With our eyes we see wavelengths between 0.00004 and 0.00008 of a centimeter (where, not so oddly, the Sun and stars emit most of their energy). The human visual spectrum from violet to red is "but one octave on an imaginary electromagnetic piano with a keyboard hundreds of kilometers long," according to astronomer James Kaler.

In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope's 'Pillars of Creation' image of the Eagle Nebula became one of the most iconic images of the 20th century. Recently, two of the European Space Agency orbiting observatories have created stunning new images of the region.

 

                 

 

The 1995 Hubble image above hinted at new stars being born within the pillars, deeply inside small clumps known as 'evaporating gaseous globules' or EGGs. Owing to obscuring dust, Hubble's visible light picture was unable to see inside and prove that young stars were indeed forming.   

The new ESA Herschel Space Observatory's image above shows the pillars and the wide field of gas and dust around them. Captured in far-infrared wavelengths, the image allows astronomers to see inside the pillars and structures in the region.

In parallel, a new multi-energy X-ray image (below) from ESA's XMM-Newton telescope shows those hot young stars responsible for carving the pillars. Combining the new space data with near-infrared images from the European Southern Observatory's (ESO's) Very Large Telescope at Paranal, Chile, and visible-light data from its Max Planck Gesellschaft 2.2m diameter telescope at La Silla, Chile, we see this iconic region of the sky in a uniquely beautiful and revealing way.  

                

In visible wavelengths, the nebula shines mainly due to reflected starlight and hot gas filling the giant cavity, covering the surfaces of the pillars and other dusty structures. At near-infrared wavelengths, the dust becomes almost transparent and the pillars practically vanish. 

In far-infrared, Herschel detects this cold dust and the pillars reappear, this time glowing in their own light. Intricate tendrils of dust and gas are seen to shine, giving astronomers clues about how it interacts with strong ultraviolet light from the hot stars seen by XMM-Newton.

 

                     

In 2001, Very Large Telescope near-infrared images had shown only a small minority of the EGGs were likely to contain stars being born. However, Herschel's image makes it possible to search for young stars over a much wider region and thus come to a much fuller understanding of the creative and destructive forces inside the Eagle Nebula.

Earlier mid-infrared images from ESA's Infrared Space Observatory and NASA's Spitzer, and the new XMM-Newton data, have led astronomers to suspect that one of the massive, hot stars in NGC6611 may have exploded in a supernova 6000 years ago, emitting a shockwave that destroyed the pillars. However, because of the distance of the Eagle Nebula, we won't see this happen for several hundred years yet.

The Daily Galaxy via ESA

Comments

[James Ph. Kotsybar]

SIDEREAL ATLAS
-- James Ph. Kotsybar

To be cataloged, stars must be sited,
so we must wait until their light appears.
New stars may have only just ignited,
and we won’t know it for a thousand years.

The charts we’ve drawn lack similarities
to current status, since stars pass away –
a few becoming singularities
(though distant, some within our Milky Way).

The bulk of all our stellar indices,
if not archaic, is at least passé.
The stars we see in distant galaxies
are not those stars as they exist today.

It’s hard to keep in mind, although we know
we only view the stars of long ago.