The James Webb Space Telescope captured the iconic “Pillars of Creation,” huge structures of gas and dust teeming with stars, NASA said on Wednesday, and the image is as majestic as one could hope.
The twinkling of thousands of stars illuminates the telescope’s first shot of the gigantic gold, copper and brown columns standing in the midst of the cosmos.
At the ends of several pillars are bright red, lava-like spots.
Photo: AFP / NASA / European Space AGENCY / Canadian Space Agency
“These are ejections from stars that are still forming,” only a few hundred thousand years old, NASA said in a statement.
These “young stars periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, like these thick pillars,” the US space agency added.
The “Pillars of Creation” are 6,500 light-years from Earth, in the Eagle Nebula of the Milky Way galaxy.
The pillars were made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope, which first captured them in 1995 and then again in 2014.
However, thanks to Webb’s infrared capabilities, the newer telescope — launched into space less than a year ago — can peer through the opacity of the pillars, revealing many new stars forming.
“By popular demand, we had to do the Pillars of Creation” with Webb, Space Telescope Science Institute science program manager Klaus Pontoppidan wrote on Wednesday on Twitter.
The institute operates Webb from Baltimore, Maryland.
“There are just so many stars,” Pontoppidan added.
“The universe is beautiful,” NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn wrote on Twitter.
The image, covering an area of about eight light-years, was taken by Webb’s primary imager NIRCam, which captures near-infrared wavelengths — invisible to the human eye.
The colors of the image have been “translated” into visible light.
The new image “will help researchers revamp their models of star formation by identifying far more precise counts of newly formed stars, along with the quantities of gas and dust in the region,” NASA said.
Operational since July, Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built and has already unleashed a raft of unprecedented data. Scientists are hopeful it would herald a new era of discovery.
One of the main goals for the US$10 billion telescope is to study the life cycle of stars. Another main research focus is on exoplanets, planets outside Earth’s solar system.
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