The James Webb Space Telescope has provided a stunning view of the ‘Pillars of Creation’, a spectacular dust cloud formation made famous by its predecessor the Hubble Space Telescope.
The image is not only stunningly beautiful, but also shows cosmic processes that have never been observed so clearly before. Here’s what astronomers see behind the sparkling, colorful tapestry.
If you like the magic of James Webb Space Telescope‘s photo of the Pillars of Creation, you must download the original image from the website of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, which manages the mission’s scientific operations. It’s not a small file. At around 150 megabytes, it can clog your internet downlink for a while. Then zoom in on the darkest regions at the tops of the pillars. Zoom in a little more until you see red dots popping into view. There are dozens of them. The smaller ones are just red spots. Others are slightly larger, resembling flowers with yellow centers surrounded by six red petals, and sometimes with Webb’s signature snowflake-like refraction patterns.
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A star Is Born …
These flower formations are newborn Stars, some of them only a few hundred thousand years old, reveals creation inside the Pillars of Creation for the first time. For Webb’s predecessors, the Hubble Space TelescopeObserving the universe primarily in visible light (wavelengths visible to the human eye), these pillars were impenetrable, ominous dark formations jutting out from the Eagle Nebulaa cloudy star cluster in the Serpent constellation below 6,000 light years away from the earth. But Webb peered through the darkness with his infrared, heat-sensing vision to show how light in the universe is born.
“The most interesting thing about this image is that it actually shows us ongoing star formation,” Anton Koekemoer, research astronomer at STScI, told Space.com.
Koekemoer assembled the stunning image from raw data captured by Webb’s powerful NIRCam camera. Amazing images of the universe are the bread and butter of Koekemoer, who previously worked on processing images from the Hubble Space Telescope. But the astronomer admits that the texture, level of detail, and amount of scientific information contained in Webb’s photographs baffles even him.
“I’m amazed at how well Webb can see into the dust and gas, which is completely dark at Hubble,” Koekemoer said. “With Hubble, you don’t see any detail at all. But Webb can use his infrared vision to penetrate directly into these regions and see stars forming in these dusty pillars. It’s extremely exciting.”
… from the cold dark dust
Professor Derek Ward-Thompson shares Koekemoer’s enthusiasm. A veteran astronomer and head of the School of Natural Sciences at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK, Ward-Thompson has published several scholarly papers on the Pillars of Creation over the years, including some on the powerful magnetic fields that hold the formation together. Still, he says, when he saw the first Webb image of his favorite cosmic hydrogen cloud, his first thought was pretty unscientific.
“I was just like, ‘Wow,'” Ward-Thompson told Space.com. “I really understood why the James Webb Space Telescope will be so much better than Hubble, which can only see the outside. It also offers much better detail and much higher resolution.”
Webb’s images, Ward-Thompson said, offer a unique window into the dark and frigid clouds where stellar embryos are incubated from a hydrogen-rich dust. For the first time, astronomers can not only theorize this process, but also study it on dozens of examples of different sizes and brightnesses.
“I’m sure Webb’s images will advance our understanding of how stars form, and therefore where our own sun came from,” Ward-Thompson said.
The red dots visible in Webb’s images are protostars, cocoons of dust and gas so dense they collapse under their own weight heaviness. As the clouds collapse, they form spinning spheres that eventually become so dense that the hydrogen atoms in their nuclei begin to fuse together in the process of nuclear fusion, causing the stars to glow.
The protostars Webb sees aren’t fully there yet, only beginning to glow in infrared light as they warm over the chill of the surrounding cloud, which is no warmer than minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 200 degrees Celsius), Ward- Thompson .
“These young stars that we see in the image are not yet burning hydrogen,” Ward-Thompson said. “But gradually, as more and more material falls in, the center gets denser and denser, and then suddenly it gets so dense that hydrogen combustion kicks in, and then suddenly its temperature rises to about 2 million degrees Celsius.” [35 million degrees F].”
Multiple stars erupt simultaneously in some of the larger bright red spots in the image. Elsewhere, their heat has yet to break through the surrounding dust.
The Pillars of Creation is one of the closest regions of active star formation to Earth, which means the location combined with Webb’s imaging power offers the best opportunity to study star formation processes, Ward-Thompson said.
15,000 pixels
Each of these red dots, which you can only see if you zoom in on the image, cover an area larger than ours solar system. The entire image, 15,000 pixels wide, covers an area about 8 to 9 light-years across.
“You can resolve things in the image that are about the size of our solar system,” Koekemoer said. “If there were individual planets like Jupiter, you couldn’t resolve them.”
The image, which Koekemoer assembled from data from NIRCam in six different filters, shows the columns in different colors than they would appear to the human eye. The only wavelength in the image that the human eye would recognize is that of the color red, which is represented as blue in the image
“The yellowish, greenish, and eventually orange and red colors go into the mid-infrared wavelengths,” Koekemoer said. “The longest wavelengths in this image are six times longer than the human eye can see.”
With each color appears a different component of the physical processes taking place in the stunning nebula. The bluish wisps of gas and dust that emerge like thin veils from the nebula’s edges are clouds of ionized hydrogen — hydrogen electrons stripped from the colder atomic hydrogen, forming the dark, dense clouds from intense ultraviolet light emitted by nearby ones massive stars.
The physics behind the pillars
With Webb’s ability to reveal the structure of the dust clouds with unprecedented nuance and texture, astronomers will also be able to study the processes that shaped the towering clouds over millions of years.
“The material that makes up the pillars is what we call the interstellar medium, the medium between the stars,” Ward-Thompson said. “It becomes more transparent the longer you go [infrared] wavelengths. The Hubble images only told us where the material was, but Webb is now showing us where it’s thicker and where it’s thinner. It’s almost like taking an X-ray.”
Astronomers know that the pillars are not a stable cosmic sculpture, but an ever-changing flow of material, similar to the ever-changing surface of a sandy beach. What shapes the pillars are powerful stellar winds emanating from a cluster of large stars not visible in this image, Ward-Thompson said. Strong cosmic magnetic fields hold the clouds together and protect them from being scattered by stellar winds. Still, in a few million years, the pillars will no longer resemble the iconic images we see today.
For Webb, the pillars are still just the beginning and offer just a glimpse of what the $10 billion telescope can accomplish, Koekemoer said.
“Everyone in the astronomical community is very excited about what the future holds for Webb,” said Koekemoer. “I think there are many more observations to come that will tell us even more about how stars and galaxies form.”
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