NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Dr. Jennifer Wiseman explains the Hubble Space Telescope's view of the Pillars of Creation, located in the Eagle Nebula.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Producer, Director & Editor: James Leigh
Director of Photography: James Ball
Executive Producers: James Leigh & Matthew Duncan
Production & Post: Origin Films
Video Credits:
Hubble Space Telescope Animation
ESA/Hubble (M. Kornmesser & L. L. Christensen)
Light Echo Animation
NASA/ESA/Hubble - M. Kornmesser
Music Credits:
"Transcode" by Lee Groves [PRS], and Peter George Marett [PRS] via Universal Production Music
“Transitions” by Ben Niblett [PRS] and Jon Cotton [PRS] via Atmosphere Music Ltd [PRS] and Universal Production Music.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Producer, Director & Editor: James Leigh
Director of Photography: James Ball
Executive Producers: James Leigh & Matthew Duncan
Production & Post: Origin Films
Video Credits:
Hubble Space Telescope Animation
ESA/Hubble (M. Kornmesser & L. L. Christensen)
Light Echo Animation
NASA/ESA/Hubble - M. Kornmesser
Music Credits:
"Transcode" by Lee Groves [PRS], and Peter George Marett [PRS] via Universal Production Music
“Transitions” by Ben Niblett [PRS] and Jon Cotton [PRS] via Atmosphere Music Ltd [PRS] and Universal Production Music.
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
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 Serpens
00:21constellation.
00:25These prominent and now famous pillars are sometimes called the Pillars of Creation because
00:31they're actually a region where new stars are still forming.
00:36So what we can see in this region is the effects of stars that have already formed, lighting
00:42up and ionizing this background wispy gas, and the environment where new stars are still
00:47in the process of forming, buried in the dense remaining columns of dust.
00:57We see some of these hotspots that are right in the region of a protostar that's forming
01:02at the tips of these columns and then down through the columns.
01:06There's one there and another one down here.
01:09As you look carefully, you can see these regions where the protostars, as they coalesce, are
01:14heating the surrounding dust cocoon right around them.
01:18But in this visible light picture, we can't see into the dust to really see what's going
01:23on 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 because
01:41the infrared channel on the Wide Field Camera 3 allows us to peer through a lot of that
01:47dust that blocks the visible light.
01:49And so instead of seeing all the structure of the pillars that the visible light image
01:55allows us to see, this infrared view allows us to see through some of that dust and we
02:00can actually see into those pillars.
02:03And then you'll also notice we see a lot more stars over the whole field because the whole
02:08field has a lot of dust, but we can see through it with this infrared view.
02:13And so we see many stars in the field that are already formed.
02:16We see regions where new stars are coalescing and heating up within these dense pillars
02:21and it gives us information that complements what we can see in the visible light 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
02:45this region.
02:46I think it's why we never really get tired of looking at it.