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"Inside the Image: Hubble Space Telescope"

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"The Eagle Nebula"

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This is a region of interstellar space,

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gas and dust in our own Milky Way galaxy.

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That's part of a nebula
we call the Eagle Nebula.

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6,500 light years away from us

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in the Serpens constellation.

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These prominent

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and now famous pillars are
sometimes called the Pillars of Creation

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because they're actually a region
where new stars are still forming.

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So what we can see in this
region is the effects of stars

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that have already formed lighting up
and ionizing this background wispy gas

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and the environment where new stars
are still in the process of forming

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buried in the dense
remaining columns of dust.

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We see some of these hot spots

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that are right in the region
of a protostar that's forming

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at the tips of these columns and then down

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through the columns. There's one there
and another one down here.

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As you look carefully,

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you can see these regions
where the protostars, as they coalesce,

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are heating the surrounding dust cocoon
right around them.

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But in this visible light picture,
we can't see into the dust

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to really see
what's going on deep inside the cloud.

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This is also an image

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of the Eagle Nebula
taken with the Hubble Space Telescope.

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However,
this image is dramatically different

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from what we see in visible light
because the infrared channel on the Wide

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Field
Camera 3 allows us to peer through

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a lot of that dust
that blocks the visible light.

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And so instead of seeing all the structure
of the pillars, that the visible light

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image allows us to see, this infrared view
allows us to see through

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some of that dust and
we can actually see into those pillars.

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And then you'll also notice
we see a lot more stars

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over the whole field
because the whole field has a lot of dust.

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But we can see through it
with this infrared view.

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And so we see many stars in the field
that are already formed.

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We see regions

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where new stars are coalescing
and heating up within these dense pillars.

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And it gives us information

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that complements what we can see
in the visible light image.

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The whole region is somewhat ethereal
because we see dust,

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we see gas, we see this lit up
region in the background,

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symphony of color and structure

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and interaction going on in this region.

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I think it's why we never really
get tired of looking at it.

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"The Eagle Nebula, Pillars of Creation"

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