by On Wednesday, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope released a snapshot of the Pillars of Creation, the towering columns of gas and dust where stars are born. The epic star nest is located within the vast Eagle Nebula, a cloud of dust and gas that is 6,500 light-years away.
The Hubble Space Telescope also toured the famous nursery in 1995. Comparing the two images side by side, Webb’s camera pierces solid columns of cosmic dust, revealing hundreds of stars that Hubble couldn’t see.
Below, a fresh snapshot of Webb in all its uncut glory, showing light-year-long tentacles of gas. There is no galaxy within sight, according to NASA. Webb’s near infrared camera captured the image using special infrared filters. It was then artificially colored to bring out specific characteristics.
In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope captured an iconic cosmic portrait of the Pillars of Creation. Both Webb and Hubble are space telescopes, but they differ in many ways. Hubble sees ultraviolet light, visible light, and a small slice of infrared, while Webb primarily looks at the universe in infrared.
Webb, which is 100 times more powerful than Hubble, can scan objects whose light was emitted more than 13.5 billion years ago, which Hubble cannot see. This is because this light has been shifted into the infrared wavelengths that Webb is specifically designed to detect.
Bottom left is the Hubble visible light view, showing brown and dark pillars. Webb’s near-infrared image, on the right, pierces through dense clouds of dust and gas and shows the same red pillars of the bright birth sites of new stars.
The red dots on the edges of the columns are young stars, which are only a few hundred thousand years old, according to the Webb team.
Webb’s image is overflowing with stars. The telescope will help researchers count newborn stars and gas and dust quantities more accurately, according to NASA. A more accurate star count will help better understand how stars form and explode from dusty clouds over millions of years.
The infrared telescope is positioned in a gravitationally stable orbit, nearly 1 million miles from Earth, but can see the light of the first stars and galaxies.
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