Wednesday, February 15, 2012

The Eagle Nebula as You’ve Never Seen it Before

The Eagle Nebula as You’ve Never Seen it Before:

A new look at M16, the Eagle Nebula in this composite from the Herschel telescope in far-infrared and XMM-Newton in X-ray. Credits: far-infrared: ESA/Herschel/PACS/SPIRE/Hill, Motte, HOBYS Key Programme Consortium; X-ray: ESA/XMM-Newton/EPIC/XMM-Newton-SOC/Boulanger

Here’s a stunning new look deep inside the iconic “Pillars of Creation.” As opposed to the famous Hubble Space Telescope image (below) — which shows mainly the surface of the pillars of gas and dust — this composite image from ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory in far-infrared and XMM-Newton telescope in X-rays allows astronomers to peer inside the pillars and see more detail of the structures in this region. It shows how the hot young stars detected by the X-ray observations are carving out cavities, sculpting and interacting with the surrounding ultra-cool gas and dust.

But enjoy the view while you can. The sad part is that likely, this beautiful region has already been destroyed by a supernova 6,000 years ago. But because of the distance, we haven’t seen it happen yet.

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