This is the image that many have been waiting for. The James-Webb Telescope revealed its first shot of the iconic Pillars of Creation on Wednesday, October 19, huge structures of gas and dust teeming with forming stars. The twinkling of thousands of stars illuminates the whole image, on which these gigantic brown and orange columns stand in the vastness of the cosmos.
Areas of intense red, at the end of several of the pillars, evoke lava. This is’“star ejections still developing”only a few hundred thousand years old, explained NASA in a press release. Ces “Young stars periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, like these thick pillars.”
The Pillars of Creation are located 6,500 light years from Earth in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Specifically, they are found in the Eagle Nebula. They were made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope, which took a first snapshot of them in 1995, revisited in 2014. But thanks to its infrared capabilities, the James-Webb Telescope, launched into space less than a an, can break through the opacity of the pillars, revealing many new forming stars.
A valuable new aid for researchers
“By popular demand, we had to take the Pillars of Creation” with James-Webb, Klaus Pontoppidan, science program manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the telescope from Baltimore, tweeted Wednesday. NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn also exclaimed: “The Universe is magnificent! »
This image, which covers an area of around eight light-years, was taken by the NIRCam instrument, which operates in the near infrared – a wavelength invisible to the human eye. The colors of the image have thus been “translated” in visible light. According to NASA, this new image “will help researchers revise their models of star formation, identifying a much more accurate count of newly formed stars, as well as the amount of gas and dust in this region.”
James-Webb, whose first color images were unveiled in July, is conducting his observations 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. One of the main purposes of this $10 billion telescope is to study the life cycle of stars. Another main line of research is the study of exoplanets, ie planets outside the solar system.