Looking like a bird ready to take flight from atop a post, this dusty filament within the Eagle Nebula was recently captured in intricate detail by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Also known as M16, this nebula lies some 7,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens the Serpent and surrounds an open star cluster. This pillar of cold gas and dust stretches 9.5 light-years long and is composed of cold hydrogen gas, which serves as material to create new stars. The newly formed stars generate powerful interstellar winds and ultraviolet light, which in this case have already formed the cloud into a long pillar that appears to billow outward near one end. Eventually this entire tendril will be eroded by the radiation from ongoing star formation.
The colors in this image highlight different wavelengths of emission. Blue is from ionized oxygen. The vibrant red is hydrogen and orange is from starlight that has cut through the darker dust.
This image is not a new one from Hubble — in fact it, was taken 20 years ago in 2005. However, after undergoing new image processing techniques, the detailed region looks better than ever. This image was released as part of a celebration of Hubble’s contribution to science over the past 35 years.
Hubble was launched into near Earth orbit April 24, 1990, as a joint project of between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). Since then it has captured more than 1.6 million observations of over 53,000 astronomical objects. In lieu of cake and balloons, NASA and ESA are gifting the public reprocessed images like this one, including the Sombrero Galaxy (M104) and NGC 346 in the Small Magellanic Cloud.
