Pillars of Creation

A now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured these star-forming columns of cold gas and cosmic dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula, dubbed the Pillars of Creation.

This James Webb Space Telescope NIRCam image expands Hubble’s exploration of that region in greater detail and depth inside the iconic stellar nursery. Particularly stunning in Webb’s infrared astronomy view is the telltale reddish emission from knots of material undergoing gravitational collapse to form stars within the natal space clouds.

The Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant. The larger bright nebula is itself an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes.

M16 lies along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy in a nebula-rich part of the cosmos, toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake).