The Pillars of Creation were once feared destroyed by a supernova
In 2007, hot gas seen by the Spitzer Space Telescope hinted that a star exploding 8,000 to 9,000 years ago might already be tearing apart the famous Pillars of Creation. When Hubble looked again in 2014, there was no sign of a supernova. The pillars should last at least another 100,000 years.
The pillars sit inside the Eagle Nebula, also catalogued as Messier 16 or NGC 6611, a young star cluster in the constellation Serpens. Jean-Philippe de Cheseaux discovered it in 1745 or 1746. Both of its nicknames, the Eagle and the Star Queen Nebula, come from the dark central pillar that rises from the southeast into the glowing heart; Robert Burnham Jr. coined the second, seeing the silhouette of a queen.
It lies about 5,700 light-years away in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way. The glowing gas is an emission nebula, an H II region, and one spire trailing off to the northeast stretches some 9.5 light-years, or roughly 90 trillion kilometres. The cluster holds about 8,100 stars, gathered mostly in a gap in the molecular cloud northwest of the pillars, and it is only 1 to 2 million years old. Its brightest member, HD 168076, shines at magnitude +8.24, within reach of good binoculars; it is really a pair of hot O-type stars, weighing about 80 suns in total and up to a million times as luminous.
Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen photographed the nebula with Hubble in 1995, and one frame became the iconic Pillars of Creation. The columns, like stalagmites rising from a cave floor, are made of hydrogen gas and dust that serve as stellar nurseries. Small dark pockets are thought to be protostars, and denser knots on and inside the pillars, dubbed evaporating gaseous globules or EGGs, are forming stars of their own.
Comparing Hubble's view with X-ray images from Chandra revealed that the young X-ray-bright stars are scattered across the nebula rather than lined up with the pillars. Any stars still forming in the EGGs are not hot enough yet to give off X-rays. Hubble's second portrait, taken in visible and infrared light twenty years after the first, measured how fast the pillars are evaporating.
Source: Eagle Nebula
