The Eagle Nebula with X-ray Hot Stars
Model: gpt-4.1
Prompt version: 1.0
What do the famous Eagle Nebula star pillars look like in X-ray light? To find out, NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory peered in and through these interstellar mountains of star formation.
It was found that in M16 the Cosmic Dust pillars themselves do not emit many X-rays, but a lot of small-but-bright X-ray sources became evident. These sources are shown as bright dots on the featured image which is a composite of exposures from Chandra X-ray Observatory (X-rays), XMM (X-rays), JWST (Infrared Astronomy), Spitzer (Infrared Astronomy), Hubble (Hubble Image), and the VLT (visible).
What stars produce these X-rays remains a topic of research, but some are hypothesized to be hot, recently-formed, low-mass stars, while others are thought to be hot, older, high-mass stars. These X-ray hot stars are scattered around the frame — the previously identified Evaporating Gaseous Globules (EGGS) seen in visible light are not currently hot enough to emit X-rays.