This is the image that many have been waiting for. It is as majestic as expected. The James Webb Telescope revealed its first shot of the iconic “Pillars of Creation” on Wednesday (October 19th), 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.
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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, NASA said in a statement. These “Young stars periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of matter, 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 year ago , can pierce the opacity of the pillars, revealing many new forming stars – brilliant red balls.
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“By popular demand, we had to do the Pillars of Creation” with James Webb, tweeted Klaus Pontoppidan on Wednesday (in English), science program manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the telescope from Baltimore. “There are just so many stars!”, he added. “The Universe is beautiful!” Also exclaimed NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn.