Photos: NASA/ESA/CSA

Back to the pillars of creation

By ULF VON RAUCHHAUPT

Photos: NASA/ESA/CSA

October 19, 2022 · The James Webb telescope visits one of the most famous targets of its predecessor Hubble.

On April 1, 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope took a series of 32 individual images that, when put together, became what is probably the most famous telescopic image in the history of astronomy to date.

The "Pillars of Creation" show a section of the Eagle Nebula, about 6,500 light-years away in the constellation of the Serpent: huge columns of gas and dust against the background of cosmic gases, which are stimulated to glow by the light of young stars.

In 2014, Hubble captured a second, higher-resolution image of the iconic cosmic entity.

Now the brand new James Webb Space Telescope has taken on the famous motif.

The image, taken with Webb's near-infrared camera (NIRCam), was released by NASA and ESA, which operates the telescope in partnership with the Canadian Space Agency, on Wednesday afternoon.

It shows the easily recognizable fingers of dust, up to four light-years long.

She modeled intense, ultraviolet light from hot stars from the clouds of matter by breaking down the molecules in them.

Overall, however, the structures are much more filigree, richer in structure and much more transparent than in the images taken by the Hubble telescope in the visible spectral range - because the cosmic material masses of the finger structure are much more transparent to infrared light.

Video: NASA/ESA/CSA

As a result, many young stars hidden from Hubble are also visible in the new image.

Since they are point sources of light from this astronomical distance, they each appear with a halo of eight rays.

These are diffraction phenomena on the instrument, the specific symmetry of which is also the reason why there are just eight rays here.

Spots can be seen at the tips of the finger-shaped structures, which are rendered in a bright red in the color scheme used here to represent infrared radiation, which is intrinsically invisible to the human eye.

These are protostars that are still stuck in the matter nebulae from which they were formed.

They are only a few hundred thousand years old and in most cases will take a few million more years

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