00:00This is a region of interstellar space, gas and dust in our own Milky Way galaxy that's
00:14part of a nebula we call the Eagle Nebula, 6,500 light years away from us in the Serpent's
00:21constellation. These prominent and now famous pillars are sometimes called the
00:29pillars of creation because they're actually a region where new stars are
00:33still forming. So what we can see is in this region is the effects of stars that
00:40have already formed lighting up and ionizing this background wispy gas and
00:45the environment where new stars are still in the process of forming buried
00:50in the dense remaining columns of dust.
00:54We see some of these hot spots that are right in the region of a protostar that's
01:01forming at the tips of these columns and then down through the columns. There's one
01:07there and another one down here. As you look carefully you can see these regions
01:11where the protostars as they coalesce are heating the surrounding dust cocoon right
01:17around them. But in this visible light picture we can't see into the dust to
01:22really see what's going on deep inside the cloud.
01:25This is also an image of the Eagle Nebula taken with the Hubble Space Telescope.
01:35However, this image is dramatically different from what we see in visible light
01:40because the infrared channel on the Wide Field Camera 3 allows us to peer through a
01:46lot of that dust that blocks the visible light. And so instead of seeing all the
01:51structure of the pillars that the visible light image allows us to see, this infrared
01:57view allows us to see through some of that dust and we can actually see into those
02:02pillars. And then you'll also notice we see a lot more stars over the whole field
02:07because the whole field has a lot of dust but we can see through it with this
02:11infrared view. And so we see many stars in the field that are already formed. We see
02:16regions where new stars are coalescing and heating up within these dense
02:20pillars and it gives us information that complements what we can see in the visible
02:25light image.
02:29The whole region is somewhat ethereal because we see dust, we see gas, we see this lit up
02:38region in the background, symphony of color and structure and interaction going on in this
02:45region. I think it's why we never really get tired of looking at it.
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