00:06This 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 in this region is the effects of stars that have
00:40already formed lighting up and ionizing this background wispy gas and the
00:45environment where new stars are still in the process of forming buried in the
00:50dense remaining columns of dust.
00:56We 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.
01:29This 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
01:56infrared view allows us to see through some of that dust and we can actually see
02:01into those pillars. And then you'll also notice we see a lot more stars over the
02:06whole field because the whole field has a lot of dust but we can see through it
02:11with this infrared view. And so we see many stars in the field that are already
02:15formed. We see regions where new stars are coalescing and heating up within these
02:20dense pillars and it gives us information that complements what we can see in the
02:25visible light image.
02:29The whole region is somewhat ethereal because we see dust, we see gas, we see this lit up region in
02:38the background,
02:39symphony of color and structure and interaction going on in this region. I think
02:46it's why we never really get tired of looking at it.
Comments