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File:Pillars of creation 2014 HST WFC3-UVIS full-res.jpg

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Summary

Description
English: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revisited the famous Pillars of Creation, revealing a sharper and wider view of the structures in this visible-light image.

Astronomers combined several Hubble exposures to assemble the wider view. The towering pillars are about 5 light-years tall. The dark, finger-like feature at bottom right may be a smaller version of the giant pillars. The new image was taken with Hubble's versatile and sharp-eyed Wide Field Camera 3.

The pillars are bathed in the blistering ultraviolet light from a grouping of young, massive stars located off the top of the image. Streamers of gas can be seen bleeding off the pillars as the intense radiation heats and evaporates it into space. Denser regions of the pillars are shadowing material beneath them from the powerful radiation. Stars are being born deep inside the pillars, which are made of cold hydrogen gas laced with dust. The pillars are part of a small region of the Eagle Nebula, a vast star-forming region 6,500 light-years from Earth.

The colors in the image highlight emission from several chemical elements. Oxygen emission is blue, sulfur is orange, and hydrogen and nitrogen are green.

A number of Herbig-Haro jets lengthened noticeably (see lower panel of linked page) in the 20-year interval between the two Hubble images.

Object Names: M16, Eagle Nebula, NGC 6611

A longer news release is linked here.
Date (released 2015-01-05)
Source http://hubblesite.org/image/3471/news_release/2015-01
Author NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
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Licensing

Public domain This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if ESA material created after 2008 or source material from other organizations is in use.
The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute under Contract NAS5-26555, or for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or 2008 copyright statement at spacetelescope.org. For material created by the European Space Agency on the spacetelescope.org site since 2009, use the {{ESA-Hubble}} tag.

Captions

Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation (2014) / original file

Items portrayed in this file

depicts

Pillars of Creation

inception

29 October 2014

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Date/TimeThumbnailDimensionsUserComment
current23:13, 1 February 2015Thumbnail for version as of 23:13, 1 February 20156,780 × 7,071 (69.72 MB)WolfmanSFReverted to version as of 06:43, 7 January 2015 - needed to upload the denoised version as a new file, to generate denoised zoom viewer versions - will then have to transfer FA status to new file
06:43, 7 January 2015Thumbnail for version as of 06:43, 7 January 20156,780 × 7,071 (69.72 MB)WolfmanSFUser created page with UploadWizard

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