It’s hard to choose a favorite view spaceBut many astronomers Pillars of CreationA spectacular cloud of interstellar gas and dust that resembles the shape of a human hand.
now National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Scientists have created a narrated 3D tour of this cosmic wonder, a tiny part of the giant Eagle Nebula, located about 6,500 light-years away in the Milky Way galaxy.
The film (see below) is not an artistic depiction, but rather a look at the Hubble Space Telescope, which took the first photographs of the famous pillars in 1995, and the James Webb Space TelescopeThe film features the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the retired Spitzer Space Telescope.
The video is intended to help people understand how different telescopes provide different information, as well as to give viewers a rough idea of how star formation happens, said Frank Summers, chief visualization scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who will present the video next month at the International Planetarium Association conference in Berlin.
“The stars actually help create the dust pillars that create the stars,” Summers said. statement“Stars are forming in the Eagle Nebula, a giant cloud of dust.”
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Webb Telescope’s “Pillars of Creation” shows us things Hubble couldn’t see
The Pillars of Creation are made of tiny dust particles, mostly carbon and hydrogen, weathered by ultraviolet light from nearby hot young stars. The finger-like pillars are enormous, with the tallest pillars stretching out for more than three light years, longer than the width of our solar system.
In Webb’s infrared images, young stars just a few hundred thousand years old peek out like rubies from the cloud’s edges, reddish fingertips made of energetic hydrogen from young stars that sometimes spew undulating jets.
NASA has previously described the pillar as “practically pulsating with activity,” and this new perspective could help scientists better understand how young stars shed their dusty cocoons over millions of years.
The researchers used the same NASA data featured in the 3D video to create a 3D printed model of the Pillars of Creation.
Credit: NASA / STScI / R. Crawford / L. Hustak
The video begins by zooming in from the Milky Way to the Pillars of the Universe, at a magnification of more than 10,000 times, as the virtual camera flies between and around our fingers like a gnat, revealing four separate dust clouds and the gas streaming out from each.
Without a 3D view, one of the pillars might not be visible.
The Webb telescope gives researchers a crystal-clear view through dense dust, while the Hubble telescope peers at the universe in visible light, shining at thousands of degrees, and astronomers say combining both observations provides a more complete picture.
