The Eagle Nebula, located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Serpens, is visible as a fuzzy red spot to backyard astronomers with a modest telescope.
In 1995, NASA's Hubble space telescope captured a famous image of one region within the Eagle Nebula: a star-forming cluster named NGC6611, known as the "Pillars of Creation." Light and heat from young stars carved out the iconic pillars, which are each several trillion miles long.
Herschel's image isn't just beautiful, it also updates the Hubble photo and reveals new details about the region. While the Hubble image -- taken in optical wavelengths -- suggested that the area was a stellar nursery, obscuring dust prevented researchers from proving this.
The above photo, taken in far-infrared wavelengths that can penetrate the dust, gives astronomers an insider's view of the pillars. They can now see the cocoons of gas and dust that surround the young stars as they form. Eventually, these casings will blow away and the star's light will be visible.
The Herschel data has also been combined with ESA's XMM-Newton space telescope, which sees the powerful x-ray radiation that the hot, young stars generate. These points stand out as a rainbow of dots near the image center.
The data also suggests one of the massive, hot stars in NGC6611 may have exploded in a supernova 6,000 years ago, releasing a shockwave that destroyed the pillars. Because of the distance of the Eagle Nebula, the destruction of the pillars won't be visible on Earth for hundreds of years.
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