Eagle Nebula, Messier 16

Though this towering structure of billowing gas and dark, obscuring dust is only a small portion of the Eagle Nebula (Messier 16), it is no less majestic in appearance for it. The pillar rises 9.5 light-years tall and is 7,000 light-years away from Earth. This latest Hubble view uses new processing techniques and is part of ESA/Hubble’s 35th anniversary celebrations. The cosmic cloud is primarily cold hydrogen gas, like the rest of the Eagle Nebula. In regions like this, new stars are born among the collapsing clouds. Hot, energetic, and formed in great numbers, the young stars unleash an onslaught of ultraviolet light and stellar winds that sculpt the gas clouds around them. This produces fanciful shapes like the narrow pillar with a blossoming head that we see here. The material in the pillar is thick and opaque to light; its edges outlined by the glow of more distant gas behind it. Emission from ionized oxygen dominates the blue colors of the background; the red colors lower down, glowing hydrogen. Orange indicates starlight that managed to break through the dark dust which blocks bluer wavelengths more easily leaving the redder light to pass through. The stars responsible for carving this intricate structure lie just out of view, at the Eagle Nebula’s center. As their radiation pressure batters and compresses the gas in this tower of clouds, it could be igniting further star formation within the pillar. While the pillar withstood these forces well so far, cutting an impressive shape against the background, the radiation pressure from the multitude of new stars that form in the Eagle Nebula will eventually erode it away.