Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
For the first time, astronomers have produced a fully three-dimensional view of the Pillars of Creation, using the MUSE instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to capture the iconic billowing dust pillars in new detail and discover never-before-seen features.
The Pillars of Creation, a feature located in the Eagle Nebula (Messier 16) are located approximately 7,000 light years away and are “a classic example of the column-like shapes that develop in the giant clouds of gas and dust that are the birthplaces of new stars,” the ESO said in a statement. And here’s the image:
Credit: Imgur
Just kidding; these are ferrets.
The columns arise when extremely large, newly formed blue-white O and B stars give off UV radiation and stellar winds that cause less dense materials to be blown away. Dust and gas pockets that are denser can resist this erosion for longer periods of time, and the thicker dust pockets can shield material from that radiation and stellar wind.
As result, dark “tails” or “elephant trunks” are created, pointing away from the bright O and B stars. To us, they look like a dusty pillar. Now, the authors of a new study published Thursday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society reported that they had used the MUSE instrument to illustrate the ongoing evaporation of the Pillars in unprecedented detail.
New features discovered; pillars’ lifespan determined
Lead authors and astronomers wrote that they were able to reveal the orientation of the pillars and how they are distributed in space. They also found new details, such as a previously undetected jet from a young star.
The left tip of the pillar is facing the Earth, the authors found using MUSE, and is atop a pillar that unlike the others is actually located behind a nearby star cluster, NGC 6611. The tip of this pillar is being exposed to massive amounts of radiation from the cluster’s stars, and as a result, it appears to be brighter to the human eye than the bottom left, middle and right pillars.
The tips of those other three pillars are all pointed away from our point-of-view, they noted. While there have been several studies that have identified that these pillars are home to still-forming protostars, the new paper also revealed new evidence of two gestating stars in the left and middle pillars, as well as a jet from a young star that had not been previously found.
The authors were also able to determine the pillars’ rate of evaporation. Their observations show that the structures shed approximately 70 times of the Sun’s mass every one-million years or so. Based on the present mass of the columns (about 200 times that of the Sun), the authors concluded that the Pillars of Creation have an expected lifespan of just three million more years, a mere cosmic blink of the eye.
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