Webb Space Telescope captures ‘Pillars of Creation’ with new clarity

One of the most celebrated, awe-inspiring images of modern astronomy, revealing colossal spires of interstellar gas and dust called the Pillars of Creation, has been rendered anew with greater depth, clarity, and color by the James Webb Space Telescope.

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 form 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 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.

✨ A new photo from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the Pillars of Creation — made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope — in vivid detail like never before.

Just compare JWST's photo (left) to Hubble's 2014 version. https://t.co/y5560opESe pic.twitter.com/AjYzQuubO7

— Axios (@axios) October 19, 2022

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 the pillars are infant stars, where enormous knots of gas and dust have collapsed under their gravity and slowly heated up, giving birth to new stellar bodies, according to NASA.

The U.S. space agency said that 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.

Nearly two decades in the making under contract for NASA by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp, the $9 billion Webb infrared telescope was launched into 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.