In 1995, the photograph of the “Pillars of Creation” of theEagle Nebula, obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope, became one of the iconic images of the 20th century. Two ESA space telescopes now provide new data on thisenigmatic and beautiful star-forming region.
The Eagle Nebula is located 6,500 light years from Earth, in the constellation Serpens. Containsa hot young star cluster, NGC6611, visible even with amateur telescopes, which sculpts and illuminates the gas and dust around it, thus generating gigantic column-like hollow formations, each several light-years long.
The 1995 Hubble image suggested that new stars were forming in these pillars, specifically within gas clusters known as EGG, which stands for Evaporating Gaseous Globules. But the dust present in the region prevented Hubble from seeing what was happening, and verifying that indeedthe pillars house stars in formation.
The new images now obtained by ESA’s Herschel Space Telescope show the pillars and the surrounding gas and dust in full magnitude. Herschel’s observations, at far-infrared wavelengths, allow astronomers to see inside structures. In parallel, new X-ray observations obtained with theXMM-Newton telescope, from ESA, reveal the presence of the young hot stars responsible for sculpting the pillars.
These data from both space telescopes have also been combined with observations obtained with the VLT telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Paranal (Chile), in the near infrared; and in visible light with the Max Planck Gesellschaft telescope, 2.2 meters in diameter, located in La Silla (Chile). The result is magnificent: images of a unique beauty, revealing of the processes underway in this iconic region of the sky, which you can see in this photo gallery.
