Yes, it is full of stars, and stars to be.
Twenty-seven years ago, in 1995, the Hubble Space
Telescope wowed the world with a cosmic landscape called
Pillars of Creation.
The image revealed towering mountains of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, one
of the most productive star factories in the Milky Way galaxy. It was high art
from deep space and a visual triumph for the newly repaired and reborn Hubble,
which had been marred by a blurred lens that prevented it from recording
clearer scenes of the cosmos.
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Now, the
James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s
successor, has turned its infrared eyes to see through those same columns and
inspect the newborns still in their dusty cribs. In the new view of the
pillars, released last Wednesday, cherry-red streaks and waves are jets of
material squeezed from globs of gas and dust — baby protostars — as they
collapsed and heated up toward stardom.
After 20 years
and about $10 billion, the Webb telescope launched on Christmas Day into an
orbit around the sun 1 million miles from Earth. The launch was stupendously
successful, as was the complex unfolding procedure in space that put the
telescope into operational mode.
The Webb is designed to see infrared light,
electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths longer than visible light — colors
no human eye has ever seen. Viewing the cosmos in these wavelengths allows
astronomers to see distant galaxies whose light has shifted into infrared with
their motion away from Earth, and to peer through dust clouds that litter the
lanes of interstellar space.
The telescope has proved its worth. In the past few
months, it has dazzled astronomers with new views of a universe that they
thought they knew: galaxies and stars at the edge of time, only a few hundred
million years after the
Big Bang; spooky pictures of planets such as Neptune
and Jupiter; delicate probes of the atmospheres of exoplanets that are possible
lairs of alien life-forms; a view of detritus from a small asteroid just after
the NASA DART spacecraft, practicing planetary defense, intentionally smashed
into it; and cosmic landscapes such as the Pillars of Creation or the cosmic
cliffs of the Carina Nebula, emphasizing the immense scale and fragile drama of
the cycles of creation and destruction that characterize the seasons of
existence in our galaxy.
The Eagle Nebula is about 6,500 light-years from
Earth and is in the constellation Serpens, from the Latin word for “serpent”.
The nebula, known also as Messier 16, is starlight that can be barely glimpsed
by the naked eye on clear evenings in July and August.
Enjoy it while you can: In a few million years, the
nebula will be gone, evaporated by its fierce stellar progeny like a fleecy
windblown cirrus cloud on a summer afternoon.
The new image was made with Webb’s Near Infrared Camera, or
NIRCam. Astronomers said in a news release that the telescope’s observation
would allow a better census of the nebula’s stars and their types, and thus
improve their models and theories of how stars form, escape from their dusty
crèches, die, and pass on their substances to the future. Dust to dust, ashes
to ashes.
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