NASA Showed A Video Of The Flight To The “Pillars of Creation”
A team of NASA scientists has visualized an iconic cosmic image – the Pillars of Creation. This is the name given to the accumulations of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula. The new rendering shows the Pillars of Creation in 3D with ultra-clear detail. The recording was published on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.
The “pillars of creation” are composed of cold molecular hydrogen and dust. But this is not a monolith. Due to strong winds and radiation from nearby young and hot stars, the pillars begin to collapse. At the tops of the pillars, long, thin branching structures can be seen, each larger than our solar system.
“By flying past and between the pillars, the viewer is introduced to their three-dimensional structure and sees how differently they appear in Hubble’s visible light and in Webb’s infrared light,” explained chief imaging scientist Frank Summers. “The difference helps explain why we have more than one space telescope to observe different aspects of the same object.”
The paintings depicted in the mini-film boast stunning detail. They show many different regions and stages of star formation in the Pillars of Creation. For example, you can approach the central pillar and notice a young protostar at its top. In an infrared image this is shown as a bright red light.
