Today's Picture
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In 1995, a now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featuredPillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas anddust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula .This remarkable false-color compositeimage revisits the nearby stellar nursery with image data from the orbiting Herschel Space Observatory and XMM-Newton telescopes.Herschel's far infrared detectors record the emission fromthe region's cold dust directly, including the famous pillarsand other structures near the center of the scene.Toward the other extreme of the electromagnetic spectrum , XMM-Newton's X-ray vision reveals the massive, hot stars ofthe nebula's embedded star cluster.Hidden from Hubble's view at optical wavelengths,the massive stars have a profound effect,sculpting and transforming the natal gas and duststructures with their energetic winds and radiation.In fact, the massive stars are short lived and astronomershave found evidence in the image data pointing to the remnant of a supernova explosionwith an apparent age of 6,000 years.If true, the expanding shock waves would havedestroyed the visible structures, including the famous pillars.But because the Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant,their destruction won't be witnessed for hundreds of years.
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