Pillars of Creation

Columns of cold gas and dust about four light-years tall, eaten away by the light of hot young stars beside them. New stars are forming inside their tips. Webb sees through much of the dust in infrared.

The picture hangs at that distance facing Earth, as large as it is on the sky; how deep the object is cannot be seen, so it is flat.

Taken by

James Webb Space Telescope

Picture spans

about 7 ly

From the Sun

5,700 light-years

RA / Dec

274.73° / -13.84°

Credit

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; J. DePasquale, A. Koekemoer, A. Pagan (STScI).

Pillars of Creation is a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope that depicts elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula of the constellation Serpens, some 6,500–7,000 light-years (2,000–2,100 pc) from Earth. These elephant trunks had been discovered by John Charles Duncan in 1920 on a plate made with the Mount Wilson Observatory 60-inch telescope.

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