NASA’s 3D tour of a famous cosmic masterpiece is exquisite

It’s hard to choose a favorite view Spacebut many astronomers estimate the Pillars of Creationa stunning cloud of interstellar gas and dust that resembles a human hand.

Now NASA Scientists have created a narrated 3D tour of this cosmic wonder, a small part of the giant Eagle Nebula located about 6,500 light-years away in the Milky Way.

Rather than an artistic representation, the film (see below) is based on actual scientific data collected by a variety of observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope, which took its first images of the famous pillars in 1995, and the James Webb Space Telescopewhich observes the universe in infrared light. The film also contains data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the decommissioned Spitzer Space Telescope.

The video is intended to help viewers understand how different telescopes provide different information, while also giving them a general understanding of how stars are formed, said Frank Summers, senior visualization scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Summers will present the video next month at the International Planetarium Society conference in Berlin.

“Stars help create the dust columns that actually form stars,” Summers said in a statement. “Stars form in the Eagle Nebula, a giant dust cloud.”

The Pillars of Creation are made mostly of small grains of carbon and hydrogen dust that have been eroded by ultraviolet radiation from hot, young stars nearby. The finger-like pillars are gigantic, with the largest of them stretching further than the width of our own solar system – more than three light-years.

New stars, only a few hundred thousand years old, stand out like rubies at the edges of the cloud, thanks to Webb’s infrared view. The reddish fingertips, the result of high-energy hydrogen, are from young stars that sometimes emit wave-like jets.

NASA has previously described the pillars as “practically pulsating.” This new perspective gives scientists a better sense of how young stars shed their dust cocoons over millions of years.

The researchers used the same NASA data presented in the 3D video to create this 3D printed model of the Pillars of Creation.
Image credit: NASA / STScI / R. Crawford / L. Hustak

The video begins with a zoom from the Milky Way down to the Pillars of Creation, a magnification of more than 10,000x. Like a mosquito, the virtual camera flies in, around, and between your fingers, revealing four separate dust clouds, each emitting gas.

Without the 3D view, one of the columns could remain invisible.

While the Webb telescope gives researchers a see-through view that penetrates thick dust, the Hubble telescope sees the cosmos in visible light, which shines at thousands of degrees. Astronomers say the two views together provide a more complete picture.