Starship Asterisk*

M16: Pillars of Star Creation

Explanation: Newborn stars are forming in the Eagle Nebula. This image, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, shows evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs) emerging from pillars of molecular hydrogen gas and dust. The giant pillars are light years in length and are so dense that interior gas contracts gravitationally to form stars. At each pillars' end, the intense radiation of bright young stars causes low density material to boil away, leaving stellar nurseries of dense EGGs exposed. The Eagle Nebula, associated with the open star cluster M16, lies about 7000 light years away. The pillars of creation were imaged again in 2007 by the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope in infrared light, leading to the conjecture that the pillars may already have been destroyed by a local supernova, but light from that event has yet to reach the Earth.

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I'll have three fingers of heavy nuclei

What information is received by IR light that suggests the pillars are destroyed? IR light travels just as fast as visible light.

Where in the sky at nightfall would the supernova have been visible in the autumn of 1 B.C.?

RAD wrote:What information is received by IR light that suggests the pillars are destroyed? IR light travels just as fast as visible light.

The nebula is more transparent in IR, allowing its interior to be studied. This has revealed evidence of a recent supernova that- if correct- would have dissipated much of the Eagle Nebula structure by "now".

This, of course, is the most famous HST photo of all time! Just last week Senator Mikulski spoke to the Maryland Space Business Roundtable and reminisced that when the nightmare of spherical aberration had been discovered, she'd called HST a "technoturkey" - she said that word again - and how brilliant the recovery had been. I remember myself looking forward to the launch of HST and remembering that when I was a boy at summer camp, there was another boy who wore glasses. He told me he'd only been told a few weeks previously that he needed glasses, and that he'd gone to a movie a few days after getting glasses, and was astounded to find that movies had crisp images - he'd thought the blurring was intrinsic to the movies! We astronomers knew that, before HST, all our images of the Universe were blurred, and that with HST, for the first time ever, we would see the Universe as it really is! A pair of glasses for the whole human race! And thanks to Holland Ford and Bob Brown and others, glasses-sized lenses were added by astronauts to HST, and now, a quarter century later, the human race still has a crisp and glorious view of our Universe. Hallelujah!

Always a great pic...

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Gorgeous! Amazing detail and color!

Amazing in 1997 and amazing ever since. One of Hubble's finest!