The Hubble Telescope showed us the awe inspiring ‘Pillars of Creation’ over 20 years ago, which are the massive columns of interstellar gas and dust from the Eagle Nebula, located some 7,000 light years away. The largest of the columns is 4 light years in length, which in our fastest spaceship, would take over 6,300 years to travel across.
The Pillars of Creation refer to the gas and dust, which are in the process of creating new stars. The process takes hundreds of thousands of years, which is just a blink of an eye in cosmic time.
The original image is an astounding one, now revisited and even improved with the new James Webb Space Telescope, which is positioned one million miles from earth, able to peer deeply into space like never before.
The new images are captures taken with the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which bring different elements into focus. They show a tremendous amount of detail and clarity, exposing hundreds more stars within the dust than Hubble was able to.
Check out the entirety of this amazing new image on the James Webb website and PetaPixel.
