This bleak view of the iconic space dust structure is just the Halloween mood we need.
James Webb Space Telescope Scientists have released a second view of the iconic Pillars of Creation, staring deep into the mid-infrared. Dust clouds appear to glow in shades of blue, looming against a red background.
“Thousands of stars in this region are disappearing from view – and it seems that the endless layers of gas and dust are becoming the focus of attention,” ESA officials said. Wrote (Opens in a new tab) Friday (October 28) from the new photo.
Officials added that dust is an essential component of star formation and helps scientists discover the formation and evolution of the structure in the constellation of Taurus, which numbers about 7,000. light years away from the earth.
Related: The James Webb Space Telescope did not refute the Big Bang. Here’s how this falsehood spread.
“Many stars are actively forming in these dense blue-gray plumes. When knots of gas and dust begin to build up enough mass in these regions, they begin to collapse under the influence of their own gravity, slowly heat up, and eventually form new stars,” the European Space Agency said. Officials in the same statement.
It was great Hubble Space Telescope which first observed plume-like clouds in interstellar space a generation ago. This observatory, still active and healthy, has revisited the 1995 image several times. But Hubble and Webb are tuned to different types of light.
That’s the difference in the last two images, too: new images from Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument trace an image from the released Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) in advance this month. Both images show the plumes in much more detail than is possible with Hubble, thanks to a larger Webb mirror and a deep-space forward focus.
The NIRCam image shows the structure of the cloud, as well as many stars that were not visible in previous images that formed only a few hundred thousand years ago, NASA said in statement (Opens in a new tab) in time.
Elizabeth Hoyle is co-author of the book “Why am I taller (Opens in a new tab)? (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), book on space medicine. Follow her on Twitter Tweet embed (Opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter Tweet embed (Opens in a new tab) or Facebook (Opens in a new tab).
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