(Image: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))
Hubble is reprising one of its greatest hits. Twenty years after the release of its iconic image of the Eagle nebula’s “Pillars of Creation”, the space telescope – which turns 25 this year – has captured two new, even sharper views that peer through the pillars’ shrouds of dust.
The original image, taken in 1995 with Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, revealed three towering “elephant trunks” of gas and dust that are in the process of forming new stars. The columns are also being sculpted and eroded by winds from nearby young stars.
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These are normal features for star-forming regions, but “this particular image became rather popular”, says Paul Scowen at Arizona State University in Tempe, one of the astronomers responsible for the original photo. Not only has the image itself been used in everything from movies to bedsheets, but even its colour scheme – ionised oxygen in blue, ionised hydrogen in green, and ionised sulphur in red – has been replicated in countless astronomical images since.
“We coloured it that way not because it was pretty, but because it told you something about the physics,” Scowen says, “although it was pretty.”
Now Scowen and his colleagues have taken another look at the pillars with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. Installed in 2009, it has twice the resolution of the earlier camera. Scowen presented the images on Monday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Washington.
The new camera makes clear that the gas and dust at the pillars’ edges become denser abruptly, rather than gradually as had been expected.
The Hubble team also photographed the region at infrared wavelengths (below), which can reveal infant stars inside the gas and dust. That should help astronomers work out whether the nebula is an efficient star-former.
(Image: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))
Having two images taken 20 years apart also helps us gauge how the towers are changing. Scowen pointed out a few jets of gas that have moved in the interim. “I’d like to see how many places have evolved over time,” he says. “We highlighted the obvious ones, but there may be many more.”
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