The James Webb Space Telescope took a breathtaking look inside the “Pillars of Creation,” a spectacular dust cloud formation made famous by its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
The image is not only stunningly beautiful but also reveals cosmic processes never before observed with such clarity. Here is what astronomers see behind the sparkling, colorful tapestry.
If you want to properly take in the magic of the James Webb Space Telescope‘s photo of the Pillars of Creation, you have to download the original image from the website of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, which manages the mission’s science operations. It’s not a small file. At about 150 megabytes, it might clog your internet downlink for a while. Then zoom into the darkest regions at the tops of the pillars. Zoom in a little more, until you see red dots springing into view. There are dozens of them. The smaller ones are just plain red spots. Others are somewhat larger, resembling flowers with yellow centers surrounded by six red petals, and sometimes with Webb’s trademark snowflake-like refraction patterns.
These floral formations are newborn stars, some of them only a few hundred thousand years old, the creation inside the Pillars of Creation revealed for the first time. For Webb’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which observes the universe mostly in visible light (wavelengths that the human eye can see), these pillars were impenetrable, menacing dark formations rising from the Eagle Nebula, a cloudy cluster of stars in the constellation Serpens less than 6,000 light-years away from Earth. But Webb, with its infrared, heat-detecting gaze, peered through the darkness to reveal how light in the universe is being born.
“The most interesting thing about this image is that it’s actually showing us star formation in progress,” Anton Koekemoer, a research astronomer at STScI, told Space.com.
Koekemoer put the stunning image together from raw data taken by Webb’s powerful NIRCam camera. Amazing imagery of the universe is the daily bread and butter for Koekemoer, who previously worked on processing images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Yet the astronomer admits that the texture, level of detail and amount of scientific information contained in Webb’s photographs stuns even him.
“I’m amazed at how well Webb can see into the dust and gas that is completely dark with Hubble,” Koekemoer said. “With Hubble, you don’t see any detail at all. But Webb, with its infrared vision, can penetrate directly into these regions and see the stars forming inside those dusty pillars. It’s extremely exciting.”
The Pillars of Creation seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI).)
… from the cold dark dust
Professor Derek Ward-Thompson shares Koekemoer’s excitement. A veteran astronomer and head of the School of Natural Sciences at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K., Ward-Thompson has published several scientific papers about the Pillars of Creation over the years, including a few about the powerful magnetic fields that hold the formation together. Yet, he says, his first thought when seeing the first Webb image of his favorite cloud of cosmic hydrogen was rather unscientific.
“I just thought ‘Wow’,” Ward-Thompson told Space.com. “It really made me understand how the James Webb Space Telescope is going to be so much better than Hubble, which can only see the outside. It also provides a much better detail, much higher resolution.”
Webb’s images, Ward-Thompson said, are providing a unique window into the dark and freezing clouds where stellar embryos are being incubated from a hydrogen-rich dust. For the first time, astronomers can not only theorize about this process but also study it in dozens of examples of various sizes and brightness levels.
“I’m sure that Webb’s images will advance our understanding of how stars form and, hence, where our own sun came from,” Ward-Thompson.
The red dots visible in Webb’s images are protostars, cocoons of dust and gas so dense that they are collapsing together under the weight of their own gravity. As the clouds collapse, they form rotating balls, which will eventually become so dense that the hydrogen atoms in their cores will begin to fuse together in the process of nuclear fusion, which makes stars shine.
The protostars that Webb sees are not fully there yet, only beginning to glow in the infrared light as they warm above the coldness of the surrounding cloud, which is no warmer than minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 200 degrees Celsius), said Ward-Thompson.
“These young stars that we see in the image are not yet burning hydrogen,” Ward-Thompson said. “But gradually, as more and more material falls in, the middle becomes denser and denser, and then suddenly, it becomes so dense that the hydrogen burning switches on, and then suddenly their temperature jumps up to about 2 million degrees Celsius [35 million degrees F].”
In some of the larger bright red patches in the image, several stars are bursting out at once. Elsewhere, their heat has not yet broken through the surrounding dust.
The Pillars of Creation are one of the closest regions of active star formation to Earth, which means that in combination with Webb’s imaging powers, the site provides the best opportunity to study star-forming processes, Ward-Thompson said.
The iconic Pillars of Creation. The Hubble Space Telescope’s view on the left, the new James Webb Space Telescope photo on the right. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI).)
15,000 pixels
Each of those red dots that you can only see when you zoom into the image covers an area larger than our solar system. The whole image, 15,000 pixels wide, captures an area some 8 to 9 light years-across.
“You can resolve things that are about the size of our solar system in the image,” Koekemoer said. “If there were individual planets like Jupiter, you wouldn’t be able to resolve those.”
The image, which Koekemoer assembled from data taken by NIRCam in six different filters, shows the Pillars in different colors than they would appear to the human eye. The only wavelength in the image that the human eye would detect is that of the color red, which is represented as blue in the image
“The yellowish, greenish and ultimately orange and red colors go to the mid-infrared wavelengths,” Koekemoer said. “The longest wavelengths in this image are six times longer than the human eye could see.”
With each color, a different component of the physical processes taking place in the stunning nebula appears. The bluish wisps of gas and dust that emanate like thin veils out of the nebula’s edges are clouds of ionized hydrogen — hydrogen electrons stripped from the colder atomic hydrogen forming the dark dense clouds by intense ultraviolet light streaming from nearby massive stars.
Ionized hydrogen billowing out of the dense clouds of molecular dust that forms the Pillars of Creation. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)
The physics behind the pillars
With Webb’s ability to reveal the structure of the dust clouds with unprecedented nuance and texture, astronomers will also be able to study the processes that sculpted the towering clouds over millions of years.
“The material that the pillars are made of is what we call the interstellar medium, the medium between the stars,” Ward-Thompson said. “It becomes more transparent as you go to longer [infrared] wavelengths. The Hubble images told us only where the material was, but Webb now shows us where it’s thicker and where it’s thinner. It’s almost like making an X-ray of a human.”
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Astronomers know that the Pillars are not a stable cosmic sculpture but rather a constantly changing flow of material, similar to the constantly changing surface of a sandy beach. What shapes the pillars are powerful stellar winds emanating from a cluster of large stars, which is not visible in this image, Ward-Thompson said. Strong cosmic magnetic fields hold the clouds together, protecting them from being dispersed by the stellar winds. Still, within several million years, the Pillars will no longer resemble the iconic images that we see today.
For Webb, the Pillars are still just the beginning, providing only a glimpse of what the $10 billion telescope can accomplish, Koekemoer said.
“Everybody in the astronomical community is very excited about what the future holds for Webb,” Koekemoer said. “I think there’ll be many more observations coming down the road that will show us even more about how stars and galaxies are forming.”
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The body of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei — who died after being set on fire by her partner in Kenya — was received Friday by family and anti-femicide crusaders, ahead of her burial a day later.
Cheptegei’s family met with dozens of activists Friday who had marched to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital’s morgue in the western city of Eldoret while chanting anti-femicide slogans.
She is the fourth female athlete to have been killed by her partner in Kenya in yet another case of gender-based violence in recent years.
Viola Cheptoo, the founder of Tirop Angels – an organization that was formed in honor of athlete Agnes Tirop, who was stabbed to death in 2021, said stakeholders need to ensure this is the last death of an athlete due to gender-based violence.
“We are here to say that enough is enough, we are tired of burying our sisters due to GBV,” she said.
It was a somber mood at the morgue as athletes and family members viewed Cheptegei’s body which sustained 80% of burns after she was doused with gasoline by her partner Dickson Ndiema. Ndiema sustained 30% burns on his body and later succumbed.
Ndiema and Cheptegei were said to have quarreled over a piece of land that the athlete bought in Kenya, according to a report filed by the local chief.
Cheptegei competed in the women’s marathon at the Paris Olympics less than a month before the attack. She finished in 44th place.
Cheptegei’s father, Joseph, said that the body will make a brief stop at their home in the Endebess area before proceeding to Bukwo in eastern Uganda for a night vigil and burial on Saturday.
“We are in the final part of giving my daughter the last respect,” a visibly distraught Joseph said.
He told reporters last week that Ndiema was stalking and threatening Cheptegei and the family had informed police.
Four in 10 women or an estimated 41% of dating or married Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by their current or most recent partner, according to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2022.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
