The
new view of the pillars, first made famous when captured in 1995
by Webb's predecessor observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope,
was unveiled by NASA on Wednesday, three months after Webb's
inaugural batch of cosmic photos was unveiled as it began full
operations.
The spellbinding images show vast, towering columns of dense
clouds of gas and dust where young stars are forming in a region
of the Eagle Nebula, in the Serpens constellation, some 6,500
light-years from Earth.
The image became a worldwide cultural phenomenon, emblazoned on
to everyday objects ranging from T-shirts to coffee mugs.
Revisited by Hubble's visible-light optics to create a sharper,
wider scene in 2014, the pillars were rendered by Webb in the
near-infrared spectrum with even greater translucency, bringing
many more stars into view while revealing new contours of the
gas-and-dust clouds.
The new view "will help researchers revamp their models of star
formation by identifying far more precise counts of newly formed
stars, along with the quantities of gas and dust in the region,"
NASA said in material accompanying the latest image.
Bright red orbs appearing just outside of the pillars are infant
stars, where enormous knots of gas and dust have collapsed under
their own gravity and slowly heated up, giving birth to new
stellar bodies, according to NASA.
Wavy crimson lines that look like lava at the edge of some
pillars are ejections of matter from stars still forming within
the gas and dust and are estimated to be only a few
hundred-thousand years old, the U.S. space agency said.
Nearly two decades in the making under contract for NASA by
aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp, the $9 billion Webb
infrared telescope was launched to space on Dec. 25, 2021, in
partnership with the European Space Agency and the Canadian
Space Agency.
It reached its destination in solar orbit nearly 1 million miles
from Earth a month later and is expected to revolutionize
astronomy by allowing scientists to peer farther than before and
with greater precision into the cosmos, to the dawn of the known
universe.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; editing by Richard
Pullin)
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