The Pillars of Creation are famous pillars of gas and dust found in one of the several star-forming regions of the Eagle Nebula, Messier 16.



The region was named after a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on April 1, 1995. The stars formed in this region have surface temperatures exceeding 30,000 degrees Celsius while they are on the main sequence. In comparison, the Sun’s temperature is only about 5,500 degrees. The young stars in M16 are a source of strong stellar wind and intense ultraviolet light that shapes and gradually erodes the gas and dust structures in the region.

The Hubble image by Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen, astronomers at Arizona State University at the time, was so named because the pillars of gas were in the process of creating new stars. At the same time, the pillars were also being destroyed by the intense ultraviolet radiation from the nearby newly formed stars.













The Pillars of Creation are composed of dust and cool molecular hydrogen. The tallest pillar, to the left of the image, is roughly 4 light years high, while the protrusions seen at the top of the clouds that form the pillars are larger in size than the entire solar system.

The gas behind the protrusions is shielded from the ultraviolet radiation of the young stars by evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs), regions of hydrogen gas that were first conclusively identified in Hubble images in 1995. The gas and dust inside the EGGs are denser than those outside and eventually begin to form protostars, making EGGs incubators of new stars.

A near-infrared survey using the Very Large Telescope’s (VLT) 8.2m-diameter ANTU telescope and the ISAAC (Infrared Spectrometry and Array Camera) instrument has revealed that 11 of the 73 EGGs possibly contained young, low-mass stars and that the tips of the three pillars also had young stars and nebulosity not revealed by the Hubble image.

The Pillars of Creation were likely destroyed in a supernova explosion some 6,000 years ago. Photographs taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope have revealed a cloud of hot dust near the pillars that could have been a shock wave created by the supernova, and if this were the case, the pillars would have been directly in the shock wave’s path.

As the pillars are located at a distance of 7,000 light years from Earth, the destruction – if it had indeed occurred – will not be visible from Earth for another 1,000 years. However, there are scientists who believe that the supernova event may not have occurred at all, as the radio and X-ray radiation should have been more intense than those observed. Without the supernova event, the pillars will be eroded more gradually, over a longer period of time.







The Herschel Space Observatory photographed the Pillars of Creation in far-infrared wavelengths in 2011. The image provided astronomers with a better insight into the structures, processes and forces at play inside the region of the Eagle Nebula.

The X-ray images of the Pillars of Creation from the Chandra X-ray Observatory have revealed that any newly formed stars embedded with the EGGs are not hot enough yet to emit X-rays as all X-ray sources were found randomly scattered around the area, not coinciding with the pillars.

A new image of the pillars, taken by Hubble, was unveiled at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle in January 2015 in celebration of Hubble’s 25th anniversary on April 24, 2015. The pillars were photographed with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and the image was created using visible light and near-infrared exposure.

The pillar structure in the Eagle Nebula is similar to the one found in the much larger Soul Nebula (Westerhout 5, IC 1848), a star-forming region located in the constellation Cassiopeia, which was photographed by Spitzer in 2005. The gas pillars in the Soul Nebula, which also resemble stalagmites sticking out from the floor of a cavern, are known as the “Pillars of Star Creation.”

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