Astronomers ‘dissect’ Pillars of Creation to expose process of star birth

SCIENTISTS have dissected one of astronomy’s most famous images and discovered a tragic side to the story of the evolution of stars.

SCIENTISTS have dissected one of astronomy’s most famous images and discovered a tragic side to the story of the evolution of stars.

It seems the act of starbirth comes at a hefty price: The death of their beautiful, dusty wombs.

The iconic gas clouds in part of the Eagle Nebula shot to fame when the original Hubble Space Telescope image was released two decades ago.

Enhanced view... The Hubble Space Telescope recently revisited one of its most famous finds - the Pillars of Creation. Source: NASA

Intense radiation and stellar winds from a cluster of brilliant stars has sculpted the mass of dust into its present jutting structure.

But its elegant form is also delicate: The tendrils are only expected to last another three million years.

Now the ground-based Very Large Telescope has been pointed in its direction, peering across the 7000-light years of void to provide new layers of definition which have allowed the iconic object to be calculated in three dimensions.

The study follows a closer look by Hubble itself at the intricate star strucutre earlier this year.

Creation dissected ... The MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope created a three-dimensional view of the iconic Pillars of Creation by assigning each pixel in the data to part of a spectrum that reveals a host of information about the motions and physical conditions of the gas at that point. Source: ESO

The new view has cast light on the clouds of dust and gas which are the “engines of creation” for new stars.

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And it’s the stellar winds of several young, bright blue-white stars that are — in fact — the cause of its enticing shape, and eventual demise.

The denser pockets of dust are acting as “windbreaks”, preventing the delicate gas clouds behind them from being “weathered away”. This shielding has allowed the formation of finger-like tendrils seemingly pointing away from the stars themselves.

Depth of field ... This visualisation of the three-dimensional structure of the Pillars of Creation shows pillars actually consist of several distinct pieces on either side of the star cluster NGC 6611. Source: ESO

The study has examined the layering of different light spectra to determine the depth of the structure.

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“MUSE has shown that the tip of the left pillar is facing us, atop a pillar that is actually situated behind NGC 6611, unlike the other pillars,” a European Space Agency news release reads.

“This tip is bearing the brunt of the radiation from NGC 6611’s stars, and as a result looks brighter to our eyes than the bottom left, middle and right pillars, whose tips are all pointed away from our view.”

Broad view ... This image is a colour composite of the Eagle Nebula (M 16) made from exposures from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (DSS2). Source: ESO

The new study discovered two “gestating” stars in the left and middle pillars. A jet from a fresh star that had previously gone unnoticed was also revealed.

As these infant stars mature, they will contribute to speeding up the ongoing erosion of the gas cloud that was their maker.

@JamieSeidel

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— ESO (@ESO) April 30, 2015