The Eagle Nebula, a vast cloud of gas and dust where stars are being born, lies some 7,000 light years distant in the direction of the constellation Serpens. Hot, newborn stars illuminate the gas. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has taken pictures of dramatic "pillars" of dense molecular hydrogen and dust within the nebula. These pillars are slowly "evaporating" under the glare of intense radiation from massive stars that were recently born nearby. Emerging from the eroding tips of the pillars are dense globules of gas and dust. Though tiny in the image, these globules are as wide as our entire solar system. New stars are forming from gas condensing within these stellar cocoons, a process that takes about one hundred million years. The following Internet links will provide additional information.
Find out more from HubbleSite:
- HST images of the Eagle Nebula and associated press-release text.
- Background information on the Eagle Nebula.
Find out more from other sources:
- The Anglo-Australian Observatory has images of the Eagle Nebula (in which you can see the pillars imaged by HST plus surrounding stars and gas that cover an area too broad for HST's field of view) taken from an Earth-based telescope:
- Links to other sites about star formation (mostly technical):
http://astro.caltech.edu/~lah/starformation.html
HubbleSite and STScI are not responsible for content found outside of hubblesite.org and stsci.edu
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