Star Formation in the Eagle Nebula

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From the original press release: Eerie, dramatic pictures from the Hubble telescope show newborn stars emerging from “eggs” — not the barnyard variety — but rather, dense, compact pockets of interstellar gas called evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs). Hubble found the “EGGs,” appropriately enough, in the Eagle nebula, a nearby star-forming region 7,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens.

These striking pictures resolve the EGGs at the tip of finger-like features protruding from monstrous columns of cold gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula (also called M16). The columns — dubbed “elephant trunks” — protrude from the wall of a vast cloud of molecular hydrogen, like stalagmites rising above the floor of a cavern. Inside the gaseous towers, which are light-years long, the interstellar gas is dense enough to collapse under its own weight, forming young stars that continue to grow as they accumulate more and more mass from their surroundings.

The image was taken as part of the telescope time that I was awarded as a member of the science team responsible for the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, or WFPC2. The WFPC2 is the camera that saved Hubble from the disaster of it’s incorrectly polished primary mirror.

The image itself is actually a combination of thirty-two different CCD frames that were taken through filters that isolate light coming from certain types of atoms.

The red part of the image shows light from singly ionized sulfur atoms glowing at a wavelength of 0.673 microns. That light traces relatively cool, dense gas. Green shows light emitted at a wavelength of 0.656 microns by hydrogen atoms. Blue light shows emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms at a wavelength of 0.501 microns. This traces the hottest, most diffuse gas streaming away from the surfaces of the pillars. The whole thing is being powered by the intense ultraviolet light coming from a cluster of massive, very hot young stars that are many thousands of times more luminous than our own Sun.

The Pillars of Creation image has appeared in countless books, TV shows, and movies.  It was made into a US Postage stamp, and was recently selected by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential images in history.

 

But I will always remember the morning that we first saw the images and thought, “Wow!”

Excerpts from the PBS NOVA special, “Origins.”

Excerpts from NatGeo’s “Hubble’s Amazing Universe.”

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