The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Wednesday shared a mind-boggling 3-D video of the ‘Pillars of Creation’, an active star-forming region within the Eagle Nebula. The video was created by compiling the images captured by NASA's Webb and Hubble telescopes.
The ‘Pillars of Creation’ have fascinated humans for decades, and the credit goes to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which captured this ethereal beauty present in the heart of the Eagle Nebula for the first time in the 1990s.
The 3D video of the ‘Pillars of Creation’ would enable viewers to fly past these pillars and experience their existence as a three-dimensional structure. The visible light images of the ‘Pillars of Creation’ have been captured by NASA's Hubble telescope, whereas, infra-red photos have been captured by NASA's Webb Telescope.
“The contrast helps them understand why we have more than one space telescope to observe different aspects of the same object,” NASA quoted principal visualization scientist Frank Summers of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore.
"By flying past and amongst the pillars, viewers experience their three-dimensional structure and see how they look different in the Hubble visible-light view versus the Webb infrared-light view," explained Summers.
The ‘Pillars of Creation’ are towering tendrils of cosmic dust and gas and sit at the heart of Eagle Nebula, originally known as M16. A nebula is a giant cloud of dust and gas in space. Some nebulas are home to dust and gas thrown out by the explosion of a dying star, whereas some are new star forming regions, just like M16.
The ‘Pillars of Creation’ hide newborn stars in their wispy columns. The region consists of gases like oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc. These clouds stretch nearly 4 to 5 light-years. The Eagle Nebulaa was discovered in 1745 by the Swiss astronomer Jean-Philippe Loys de Chéseaux. The gas cloud is located 7,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens.
