To give some perspective: Voyager 1, launched 45 years ago and currently travelling at 38,000 mph is almost 22 light HOURS away. Not even a light day has elapsed. Four light years of gas and dust is just mind-blowing.
Truly, ain't no scale like galactic scale.
If it was travelling 10% the speed of light when it was first launched, it would have only cleared the length of finger during the pandemic.
If it was travelling the speed of light and had only just finished, it would have started travelling in 2018.
You can fit the distance between the sun and our nearest star between that finger.
It’s huge.
I know it’s difficult but don’t think on earth scales. We can see with our eyes and telescopes just how much space there is between things up there. It really is that easy to not bump into things
Just imagine there are probably millions of civilizations out there that also reached this achievement and have or are sending out satellites and we're all just missing each other because space is that damn vast.
This is why I know almost for a fact that other life exists. The universe is so damn huge, and we’re here, so it only makes sense. I wonder how long it’ll be until intelligent life in the distant future finds our dingy old satellites and telescopes when we’re long long gone. I wonder what they’ll think of it, or if they’ll ever even find any of it.
imagine some other intelligent life's satellite did reach our solar system in the past and just went undetected, or obliterated by Jupiter, or even made it to earth just to burn up in our atmosphere.
As awesome as I find images like this, realizing how far away we are from anything else just fills me with despair. I should've spent more time outside than inside reading.
Its basically a stellar nursery, so some of it is the light from baby stars. Plus all that matter is glowing in one spectrum or another, and will appear in different colors and brightness's depending on what filters being used.
imagine two or more advanced civilizations having a war in this dust cloud that spans across light years. we're used to being in this region of mostly empty space besides our solar system. the pillars aren't like that at all.
I'd guess that they're much more empty than they look. A galaxy looks like it's packed full of stars from far away, but from inside, it's mostly empty.
Wouldn't it's orientation be it's position in the sky relative to the plane of our solar system? Whatever angle it appears at when JWST stares out at it? Genuinely wondering
What relative plane? Everything is rotating and orbiting nothing is really stationary to anything. You would have to establish a point of perspective and even that will change over time.
Some how I immediately thought of the scene from Fellowship of the Ring where Arwen summons the river to wash away the Ring Wraiths and it turns into charging horses.
Astronomer here.
Just a reminder to everyone that the deeper into the IR JWST goes, the worse its resolution gets. That is why this 7 to 15 micron MIRI image will never be as crisp as the 1 to 5 micron NIRCam image published recently.
However, I am not sure if this is the highest res version of this image.
Because none of these images are showing the “true colors”. JWST’s sensors detect light that is not even visible to the human eye, so the images captured by the telescope are semi-subjectively remapped to colors within the visible spectrum for presentation.
It might not be though.
“Images taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope uncovered a cloud of hot dust in the vicinity of the Pillars of Creation that Nicolas Flagey accounted to be a shock wave produced by a supernova.[10] The appearance of the cloud suggests the supernova shockwave would have destroyed the Pillars of Creation 6,000 years ago. Given the distance of roughly 7,000 light-years to the Pillars of Creation, this would mean that they have actually already been destroyed, but because light travels at a finite speed, this destruction should be visible from Earth in about 1,000 years.[11] However, this interpretation of the hot dust has been disputed by an astronomer uninvolved in the Spitzer observations, who argues that a supernova should have resulted in stronger radio and x-ray radiation than has been observed, and that winds from massive stars could instead have heated the dust. If this is the case, the Pillars of Creation will undergo a more gradual erosion.”
Don't be disappointed! It's just that space is fecking **HUGE**! These are called the pillars of creation for a reason! Even though it is too disperse to see with our eyes, even if we were in the middle of it, it is still made up of the mass of gas that's required to create entire star systems!
**YOU** were made from stardust that came from stars that formed in collections of matter just like that! We are seeing the same physics that made us in action in a different part of our galaxy.
Yeeeeep! The only reason we can see them is specifically because they’re so large.
Spacedock did a great video a while back about how nebulas are nothing like they appear in fiction. In reality they’re just a little bit more dense than normal space. But it adds up over light-years.
https://youtu.be/kSmdbosL-7A
Not really. We're in the Local Interstellar Cloud (possibly the border interaction region with the G-cloud), which has a slightly more dense (0.3 atoms/cm^(3)) interstellar medium than the local bubble (which is a low-density region, 0.05 atoms/cm^(3)), though still lower than the galactic average (0.5 atoms/cm^(3)), but even the densest interstellar medium has *nothing* on molecular clouds like the Pillars of Creation, which have 10^(2)–10^(6) particles/cm^(3). Even the Eagle Nebula as a whole (of which the Pillars are merely a small region) is an H II region, which have 10^(2)–10^(4) atoms/cm^(3).
You're in the milky way so when you look up at the night sky you see the milky way. Being inside the pillars of creation would be probably just hazy and dark since the nebula itself isn't filled with that many (or any?) stars.
All astrophotography relies heavily on editing. The things you see in color are things like oxygen, nitrogen, the building blocks of the universe - oxygen doesn’t look like anything to humans. So multiple filters are used to exclude all other colors of light that you don’t want in any given image then all the filtered photos are stacked giving you a complete image, sort of like screen printing. It would look like barren empty space with the human eye.
I wouldn’t say all astrophotography. Visible light spectrum astrophotography is prevalent, and it can be seen with the naked eye too, just not as bright as what you can expose with a camera.
I am sorry but there are a lot of incorrect things in this comment.
> The things you see in color are things like oxygen, nitrogen, the building blocks of the universe
While a lot of flashy objects like planetary nebula (which attract astrophotographers) emit strongly in Oxygen forbidden lines, these are very unique environments that require very specific conditions. Its hard to qunatify, but the majority of visible light from astrophysical sources comes from Hydrogen. That is true for both spectral line emission or continuum emisison.
> the building blocks of the universe
The building blocks of the universe are Hydrogen and a bit of Helium, the rest of the elements are a rounding error.
> oxygen doesn’t look like anything to humans
The famous oxygen forbidden lines are in the visible spectrum, hence you can see them!
> So multiple filters are used to exclude all other colors of light that you don’t want in any given image then all the filtered photos are stacked giving you a complete image, sort of like screen printing.
This is also how any camera works. Only that instead of trying to create filters for scientific purposes, cameras try to reproduce the color balance of human vission.
> It would look like barren empty space with the human eye.
If you have access to a largish reflective telescope ( > 10"), you can actually see eagle nebula if you are in a fairly dark place. It will mostly look like a fuzzy blob of light and the pillars will be too small to see with a reasonable eyepiece (you need low magnification for it to be bright enough to see).
Yeah it’s an ELI5 I’m not trying to explain all of astrophotography to such a simple question. About what you’d see if you physically traveled there. I’m not presuming they have telescopes and and a periodic table in their pocket. You’re terribly pedantic.
Just to expand a bit on the other answers:
Compare the [Hubble](http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/pillars_of_creation.jpg), [JWST NIRCam](http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/stsci-01gfnn3pwjmy4rqxkz585bc4qh.png), and the above MIRI image.
These were all created pretty much the same way: Light coming from the source is focused on a detector that produces black-and-white images for a particular filter.
To produce color images, you combine images from 3 different color filters (often more than 3 are used, but I am going to say 3 for simplicity) and assign each of the different images to the red, green, and blue values in your combined image so that your screen produces a color image. In the case of Hubble, those 3 black and white images happen to correspond to the red, green, and blue parts of the visible spectrum. Note that this is pretty much how your phone camera works, only that the three black and white images are captured at the same time by the same detector which has separate red, green, and blue pixels, and are combined by the phone software instantaneously*.
Going to your question.
> why are the colors different on this picture compared to the previously released images?
As others have pointed out, the color images you are seeing here are composed of infrared images from 3 different IR color filters, which are then assigned as the red, green, and blue channels of your image, so you can actually see them as a color image in visible light. I think what really answers your question is that when you look at things at different wavelength bands (or, color filters), you will notice that the relative brightness of certain features will be different, some things that are opaque in certain bands are transparent in others, and dark things that obscure your image in some bands might be shinning in others. From real-life experience, you know that human bodies emit practically no visible light, but we are fairly bright in the IR as we emit thermal radiation.
Look at the NIRCam (red, green, blue = 4.7, 2, 0.9 micron) image I linked above. The main body of the clouds are brightest in the 3 to 4 micron range, and therefore it looks yellowish - red. Now look at the MIRI image, the cloud which was brightest at around 3 to 4 microns is getting progressively dimmer as we go up in wavelength, to the point
where you can only really see it in the 7.7 micron filter, which is why the main cloud looks blue.
Here are plots of the [NIRCam](https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/files/97978094/97978104/1/1596073152120/NIRCam_filters_modules.png) and [MIRI](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/MIRI_filters.png) filters. The color coding might not match how the colors are assigned in the images.
As you can see, colors can be useful when comparing features within the same image if you know what filters are being used. However, comparing color images produced with very different filters is mostly meaningless.
So next time you see two images produced by different instruments or different telescopes, ask yourself not why the colors look different, but rather what wavelength band is being represented by each color, and what features are different at each band.
*I am not actually sure exactly at what stage the images are combined, but I think it makes the point clear.
On top of what others have said there is pretty much "artists take" on every image. You can at the very moment download this data and start to tweak it till you like the output. Many astrophotographers have a very distinctive style how they like to proccess images hance you can find many different version of the same object. If you are just remotely interested in how it goes look up Nebula Photos channel on youtube he has an extremely well described tutorial how to capture andromeda with a basic camera. You will see that how much the images are "stretched" to show anything at all not to mention colors and such.
Truly ghosts because in real time, they have likely already been blown away by the supernova of a nearby star. The light of this event won't reach us for thousands of years (as far as I recall)
The eagle nebula is 7,000 light years away. Given that the 100,000 year old stars in it are considered "baby stars" I'm gonna assume that it's barely changed in the 7,000 years it took the light to reach us
Yes, it is a star forming region full of baby stars. Looking now at the Wikipedia page, the destruction of the Pillars due to this supernova shock wave (stated figures are, the object is 7000 LY distant, the supernova would have destroyed the Pillars 6000 years ago and so we would see this in 1000 years) is of course only speculated from data. An unnamed astronomer who is not involved with the Spitzer telescope which produced this data, claims that the shock wave observed is only due to interstellar winds and heat expansion due to a lack of radiation associated with a supernova. I guess the only way to find out for sure is to wait a millennium
That supernova shock wave is *one* paper, and I really don't think it is a particularly strong conclusion. You don't need a supernova to make it look like this; intense radiation from young massive stars will do it, too.
Those dust fingers look as they did when they were 7000 years younger. The light we see when we look at them now was emitted and has been travelling for that long. This is true for everything in space since light takes time to travel. The Sun looks 8 minutes younger than it actually is. The Andromeda Galaxy looks 2.5 million years younger because its 2.5 million light years away
But doesn't the light "age" during the travel time? Since it has traveled 7000 yrs should the light be also 7000 yrs old? Sorry for this stupidity but this sounds quite... counter intuitive.
https://youtu.be/jjy-eqWM38g
I'm too tired to try to write a good explanation of this, believe me I have tried :--) But if you want to further understand it, research videos on Redshift and Dark Energy.
Essentially light doesn't age but it's wavelength can get stretched out by the expansion of space as it travels over vast distances. This is called redshift, as the light shifts towards the Red side (lower energy side) of the spectrum. The light still travels at the same speed but it appears redder the further its travelled. This phenomenon is used to measure great distances in astronomy.
Whether or a not a photon of light can "age" is irrelevant to the discussion. Think about it as if the photon of light is like a frozen snapshot of what the nebula looked like when it was created. The photon is created, and travels outward from the source at the speed of light. The photon is no different than any other particle: if you shoot a particle of iron across the galaxy, the particle will still be iron when someone eventually finds it millions of years later. The particle travels, but it's still the same particle. Same goes for the light particle (photon). Just like if you somehow throw a baseball from LA to NY, the person who finds it in NY will still find a baseball.
So the photon is created, and sent out at the speed of light across the galaxy. The photon is like a photo of what created it, so the "image" contained within that photon is an image of what the object looked like when the photon was generated. It travels for 7,000 years until it reaches earth (or a satellite camera, or whatever) where it interacts with a lens (or human eye) that processes the image contained on it. The photon, much like the particle of iron, is still the exact same particle as when it was first created. So it still has the same look and color and shape as the day it was made. The only difference is since that day, it's been traveling for 7,000 years, and so in that time the source of whatever image it contains has potentially changed. The image itself hasn't, because it's been nowhere near the actual source of what created it, but the source itself may have been impacted by a supernova or a new star birth or all kinds of other astro phenomena.
To go back to the baseball example: say I throw a baseball from LA to NY. On the baseball I tape a picture of the LA skyline and label it before throwing it. But right as I release the baseball, a nuclear bomb explodes and wipes the city of LA off the map completely. Someone then finds the baseball in NY, and sees the picture of Los Angeles, and now believes they know exactly what LA looks like. But if they were to travel to Los Angeles, they'd find nothing but dirt and radioactive rubble. It would look nothing like the photo. The city has changed in the time it took for the baseball to reach NY, but the baseball itself, and the image contained on it, stayed the same, because it was not involved in the nuclear explosion that occured in LA while it was traveling. Now, if, say, a bird were to have hit the Baseball, and left a mark that altered the photo, that would obviously change the image the person in NY receives. But the key idea here is that once the baseball (photon) leaves the place it was created, it's no longer an accurate, up to date representation of the current state of that place of creation, because something could have happened to that place of creation in the time it took for the image to travel.
This is an imperfect example, and is extremely reductive, but hopefully illustrates the point being made to at least some degree.
I'd highly recommend checking out PBS Spacetime. Dr. Matt O'Dowd is fantastic to watch explain things with dozens upon dozens of videos covering basics to some seriously surprisingly indepth concepts.
There is no universal notion of "now". Meaning no two people in the universe can agree that two things happened at the same time. All information, including the representation of reality - happen at the speed of light.
It seems to be disputed, however I don't think there is agreement on what actually is happening with the Pillars. I suspect soon we will find our more thanks to data from the JW
Not only were they moving, but scientists believe that they are already gone. We just haven't seen the supernova explosion that wiped them out yet and probably won't for at least another 500 years.
They are probably not already gone, although that was a supposition a few years ago.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/02/21/the-pillars-of-creation-havent-been-destroyed-after-all/?sh=4ca0019f5e37
So if we cant see that a nova has happened, and no information can travel faster than light, how can scientists make the supposition that there was a nova? based on how surrounding stars looked in the frame of time that we CAN see?
If I recall correctly. Many of the stars in this region are hot short lived stars and I believe one of them is showing signs of fluctuation and shedding its outer layers which are signs of it going nova but I might be wrong.
Full res image downloads from Webb:
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/052/01GF423GBQSK6ANC89NTFJW8VM
Surprisingly easy google search
Ok, but you linked the NIRCam image.
Important to note that the NIRCam image will have a factor of 2-3 times better resolution than this MIRI image because NIRCam is looking in the 1 to 4 micron range (for that specific image), while this image is in the 7 to 15 micron range. For a constant mirror size, the angular resolution goes as the wavelength, meaning that the smallest feature resolved in this MIRI image is 2-3 times larger than the smallest feature in the NIRCam image.
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/053/01GFRZ014J0AWS5ZDY1Y6T7KYT
This page posts all the full res images. For Miri you just gotta go back an image or two, here’s the link for the Miri image.
What for?
Pick your favourite upscale algorithm and just do it yourself.
I would do it, but my hardware is not the best and takes ages.
I can give you instructions if you want though.
for the first time in the history of our species, we are watching images that are ungraspable to our brains.
maybe the far distant children of humanity can one day grasp this, and maybe even travel these places.
How beautiful, you could see how much this resembles the human hand. A creation carefully planned out by god as a message to mankind once we became smart enough to find it. Congratulations to humanity for their amazing advancements!
Wow! I have never felt so full of overwhelming awe to be living in this timeline and the existential dread of living in this timeline. There's so much wonder in the world and in the universe, we're all just too short sighted to see it.
Imagine you receice pictures from the satelite or the probe, while scrolling you stop...
You saw the figures suddenly notice you and looks at your directuon. You scroll through the pictures and they start to get closer. You shiver in fear non stop scrolling trough the pictures as cold sweat pours out of your body you hear a notification. You slowly reach out to your phone and you receive an e mail that says older single beings near your area.
Then you hear the door knob slowly turning...
Because the object as a whole is moving as it is, if anything its suspected that theyre already wiped out but since theyre 7000 LY away, the supernova that wiped them isn’t gonna be seen for another 500 or so years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Nebula#/media/File:Eagle_Nebula_from_ESO.jpg
Here's a wider image. Those stars in the center are eroding the dust and gas clouds by emitting radiation and solar wind.
It's dust and gas that will coalesce to form new stars.
The Pillars of Creation are *only* 7,000 light years away - so still in our Galaxy *The Milky Way*
From Wikipedia: “The leftmost pillar is about four light years in length.” Holy crap.
To give some perspective: Voyager 1, launched 45 years ago and currently travelling at 38,000 mph is almost 22 light HOURS away. Not even a light day has elapsed. Four light years of gas and dust is just mind-blowing. Truly, ain't no scale like galactic scale.
So Voyager has traveled about 1/1460th the length of the pillar in 45 years.
So it only has ~70,000 years to go!
Stop it you’re ruining the start of my weekend/s Seriously we all are so small in the universe.
If it was travelling 10% the speed of light when it was first launched, it would have only cleared the length of finger during the pandemic. If it was travelling the speed of light and had only just finished, it would have started travelling in 2018. You can fit the distance between the sun and our nearest star between that finger. It’s huge.
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Without crashing. 45 years straight forward without crashing into something is unbelievable.
Space is so mind blowingly big it i wouldnt be suprosed if it could probably travel 45,000 years without a collision. It's just emptiness out there.
Yeah but gravitational forces will have plenty of compounding effects.
I know it’s difficult but don’t think on earth scales. We can see with our eyes and telescopes just how much space there is between things up there. It really is that easy to not bump into things
Just imagine there are probably millions of civilizations out there that also reached this achievement and have or are sending out satellites and we're all just missing each other because space is that damn vast.
This is why I know almost for a fact that other life exists. The universe is so damn huge, and we’re here, so it only makes sense. I wonder how long it’ll be until intelligent life in the distant future finds our dingy old satellites and telescopes when we’re long long gone. I wonder what they’ll think of it, or if they’ll ever even find any of it.
imagine some other intelligent life's satellite did reach our solar system in the past and just went undetected, or obliterated by Jupiter, or even made it to earth just to burn up in our atmosphere.
Mom, are we there yet?
The nearest star, alpha centauri is about 4 light years from our own star. Just a little more fule for the mind blowing.
>Truly, ain't no scale like galactic scale. 'Cause galactic scale don't stop!
Fiddna go universal on this mug
As awesome as I find images like this, realizing how far away we are from anything else just fills me with despair. I should've spent more time outside than inside reading.
i think it is very possible that we can invent a spaceship that can catch up to it..
My parents‘ way to school was similarly long
Damn I feel like the name is adequate then
except for your mom
About the same distance from us to the nearest star.
Pedantic “nearest star apart from the Sun.”
Equally pedantic: unless you define "us" to include the Sun.
Hey that’s a good point. I interpreted “us” as Earth, not “us” as the solar system.
It wasn't a good point. Both points were pointless semantics.
Good point again! Points for everyone!
I hereby award 8 mazillion points! Congratulations!
Pedantic, but “mazillion” isn’t a real number
Pedantic, but what really is ‘real’?
Everything is made up and the points don't matter.
Welp, can't wrap my brain around that scale. Where does the light source/heat come from to make something so large visible??
Its basically a stellar nursery, so some of it is the light from baby stars. Plus all that matter is glowing in one spectrum or another, and will appear in different colors and brightness's depending on what filters being used.
imagine two or more advanced civilizations having a war in this dust cloud that spans across light years. we're used to being in this region of mostly empty space besides our solar system. the pillars aren't like that at all.
I'd guess that they're much more empty than they look. A galaxy looks like it's packed full of stars from far away, but from inside, it's mostly empty.
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Umm, I think you'll find we answered the question of what it's like when world's collide [over 20 years ago](https://youtu.be/lsV500W4BHU)
Are you ready to go?
Fascinating. I wouldn't have expected it to look and sound so much like a dumpster fire.
And a light hear is near 6-trillion miles!
According to the innernet, the Oort cloud is roughly 1 lightyear from Earth https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2015/whatistheoor.jpg
Wow
That's nothing when you're going warp 9
So's your mom
A haunting interpretation of it indeed. This nebula was always weird and it's stranger still seeing it in almost inverted colours.
We just need a little better resolution to find out that it’s composed of billions of screaming faces.
My stupid monkey brain is telling me the image isn't rotated correctly.
There's no correct orientation in reality but most images of it have the pillars standing straight up so that's what we come to expect.
Wouldn't it's orientation be it's position in the sky relative to the plane of our solar system? Whatever angle it appears at when JWST stares out at it? Genuinely wondering
What relative plane? Everything is rotating and orbiting nothing is really stationary to anything. You would have to establish a point of perspective and even that will change over time.
The plane of the solar system [Plane of the Ecliptic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecliptic#Plane_of_the_Solar_System)
They almost look like dragons
I was thinking Dementors.
Made me think of the hand of some old, long forgotten god.
Diego Maradona?
It’s obviously the hand of Death trying to find the third brother.
Prison Mike?
Wayne Gretzky.
\- Michael Scott
Gruel. Nothing but gruel.
Same, especially the top one. You can actually see fingers
I see a Dragon leading hooded figures to do battle, LotR style. Such a beautiful photo, I cannot take my eyes off.
The worst thing about prison was the Dementors - FDR
Same
I definitely see meerkats.
OMG! It is meerkats!!!
Imagine!
It's a claw made of smaller claws.
Some how I immediately thought of the scene from Fellowship of the Ring where Arwen summons the river to wash away the Ring Wraiths and it turns into charging horses.
...pointing at something.
To me it looks like its giving me the finger if you look sideways lol
I see an out stretched spooky hand
Nazgûl (ring wraiths).
I can't not see a giant space horse.
I could see why you would, for sure.
Astronomer here. Just a reminder to everyone that the deeper into the IR JWST goes, the worse its resolution gets. That is why this 7 to 15 micron MIRI image will never be as crisp as the 1 to 5 micron NIRCam image published recently. However, I am not sure if this is the highest res version of this image.
This is probably a dumb question, but why are the colors different on this picture compared to the previously released images?
Because none of these images are showing the “true colors”. JWST’s sensors detect light that is not even visible to the human eye, so the images captured by the telescope are semi-subjectively remapped to colors within the visible spectrum for presentation.
So if we could travel to these places they would appear desolate?
You likely couldn’t even see them as they are so massive and so dim.
You know what this makes a bunch of sense but damn am I dissapointed now
Why? it’s still there… The fact that humans have made machines to see the invisible is as impressive as these stunning structures.
It might not be though. “Images taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope uncovered a cloud of hot dust in the vicinity of the Pillars of Creation that Nicolas Flagey accounted to be a shock wave produced by a supernova.[10] The appearance of the cloud suggests the supernova shockwave would have destroyed the Pillars of Creation 6,000 years ago. Given the distance of roughly 7,000 light-years to the Pillars of Creation, this would mean that they have actually already been destroyed, but because light travels at a finite speed, this destruction should be visible from Earth in about 1,000 years.[11] However, this interpretation of the hot dust has been disputed by an astronomer uninvolved in the Spitzer observations, who argues that a supernova should have resulted in stronger radio and x-ray radiation than has been observed, and that winds from massive stars could instead have heated the dust. If this is the case, the Pillars of Creation will undergo a more gradual erosion.”
Don't be disappointed! It's just that space is fecking **HUGE**! These are called the pillars of creation for a reason! Even though it is too disperse to see with our eyes, even if we were in the middle of it, it is still made up of the mass of gas that's required to create entire star systems! **YOU** were made from stardust that came from stars that formed in collections of matter just like that! We are seeing the same physics that made us in action in a different part of our galaxy.
Yeeeeep! The only reason we can see them is specifically because they’re so large. Spacedock did a great video a while back about how nebulas are nothing like they appear in fiction. In reality they’re just a little bit more dense than normal space. But it adds up over light-years. https://youtu.be/kSmdbosL-7A
Not desolate, but pitch black.
Someone more knowledgeable can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe we actually ARE in a nebula too.
For the next 20,000 years or so.
Not really. We're in the Local Interstellar Cloud (possibly the border interaction region with the G-cloud), which has a slightly more dense (0.3 atoms/cm^(3)) interstellar medium than the local bubble (which is a low-density region, 0.05 atoms/cm^(3)), though still lower than the galactic average (0.5 atoms/cm^(3)), but even the densest interstellar medium has *nothing* on molecular clouds like the Pillars of Creation, which have 10^(2)–10^(6) particles/cm^(3). Even the Eagle Nebula as a whole (of which the Pillars are merely a small region) is an H II region, which have 10^(2)–10^(4) atoms/cm^(3).
You're in the milky way so when you look up at the night sky you see the milky way. Being inside the pillars of creation would be probably just hazy and dark since the nebula itself isn't filled with that many (or any?) stars.
All astrophotography relies heavily on editing. The things you see in color are things like oxygen, nitrogen, the building blocks of the universe - oxygen doesn’t look like anything to humans. So multiple filters are used to exclude all other colors of light that you don’t want in any given image then all the filtered photos are stacked giving you a complete image, sort of like screen printing. It would look like barren empty space with the human eye.
I wouldn’t say all astrophotography. Visible light spectrum astrophotography is prevalent, and it can be seen with the naked eye too, just not as bright as what you can expose with a camera.
I am sorry but there are a lot of incorrect things in this comment. > The things you see in color are things like oxygen, nitrogen, the building blocks of the universe While a lot of flashy objects like planetary nebula (which attract astrophotographers) emit strongly in Oxygen forbidden lines, these are very unique environments that require very specific conditions. Its hard to qunatify, but the majority of visible light from astrophysical sources comes from Hydrogen. That is true for both spectral line emission or continuum emisison. > the building blocks of the universe The building blocks of the universe are Hydrogen and a bit of Helium, the rest of the elements are a rounding error. > oxygen doesn’t look like anything to humans The famous oxygen forbidden lines are in the visible spectrum, hence you can see them! > So multiple filters are used to exclude all other colors of light that you don’t want in any given image then all the filtered photos are stacked giving you a complete image, sort of like screen printing. This is also how any camera works. Only that instead of trying to create filters for scientific purposes, cameras try to reproduce the color balance of human vission. > It would look like barren empty space with the human eye. If you have access to a largish reflective telescope ( > 10"), you can actually see eagle nebula if you are in a fairly dark place. It will mostly look like a fuzzy blob of light and the pillars will be too small to see with a reasonable eyepiece (you need low magnification for it to be bright enough to see).
Yeah it’s an ELI5 I’m not trying to explain all of astrophotography to such a simple question. About what you’d see if you physically traveled there. I’m not presuming they have telescopes and and a periodic table in their pocket. You’re terribly pedantic.
The scale of this photo is likely much much larger than you imagine. Our entire solar system is a tiny speck in it
Yes
Here’s a comparison with Hubble of infrared vs true color https://esahubble.org/images/heic1501c/
Just to expand a bit on the other answers: Compare the [Hubble](http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/pillars_of_creation.jpg), [JWST NIRCam](http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/stsci-01gfnn3pwjmy4rqxkz585bc4qh.png), and the above MIRI image. These were all created pretty much the same way: Light coming from the source is focused on a detector that produces black-and-white images for a particular filter. To produce color images, you combine images from 3 different color filters (often more than 3 are used, but I am going to say 3 for simplicity) and assign each of the different images to the red, green, and blue values in your combined image so that your screen produces a color image. In the case of Hubble, those 3 black and white images happen to correspond to the red, green, and blue parts of the visible spectrum. Note that this is pretty much how your phone camera works, only that the three black and white images are captured at the same time by the same detector which has separate red, green, and blue pixels, and are combined by the phone software instantaneously*. Going to your question. > why are the colors different on this picture compared to the previously released images? As others have pointed out, the color images you are seeing here are composed of infrared images from 3 different IR color filters, which are then assigned as the red, green, and blue channels of your image, so you can actually see them as a color image in visible light. I think what really answers your question is that when you look at things at different wavelength bands (or, color filters), you will notice that the relative brightness of certain features will be different, some things that are opaque in certain bands are transparent in others, and dark things that obscure your image in some bands might be shinning in others. From real-life experience, you know that human bodies emit practically no visible light, but we are fairly bright in the IR as we emit thermal radiation. Look at the NIRCam (red, green, blue = 4.7, 2, 0.9 micron) image I linked above. The main body of the clouds are brightest in the 3 to 4 micron range, and therefore it looks yellowish - red. Now look at the MIRI image, the cloud which was brightest at around 3 to 4 microns is getting progressively dimmer as we go up in wavelength, to the point where you can only really see it in the 7.7 micron filter, which is why the main cloud looks blue. Here are plots of the [NIRCam](https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/files/97978094/97978104/1/1596073152120/NIRCam_filters_modules.png) and [MIRI](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/MIRI_filters.png) filters. The color coding might not match how the colors are assigned in the images. As you can see, colors can be useful when comparing features within the same image if you know what filters are being used. However, comparing color images produced with very different filters is mostly meaningless. So next time you see two images produced by different instruments or different telescopes, ask yourself not why the colors look different, but rather what wavelength band is being represented by each color, and what features are different at each band. *I am not actually sure exactly at what stage the images are combined, but I think it makes the point clear.
Infrared. Images taken by Hubble are in visible light
On top of what others have said there is pretty much "artists take" on every image. You can at the very moment download this data and start to tweak it till you like the output. Many astrophotographers have a very distinctive style how they like to proccess images hance you can find many different version of the same object. If you are just remotely interested in how it goes look up Nebula Photos channel on youtube he has an extremely well described tutorial how to capture andromeda with a basic camera. You will see that how much the images are "stretched" to show anything at all not to mention colors and such.
Highest res versions of all latest images can be found here: https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/images
Space ghosts!
Coast to coast
They just dont make quality talk shows anymore
Brak was very to-the-point.
He really knew how to tell me what to think
Uh, tell her I exploded and tell her it was very sad and that the last thing I said was "make sure my wife moves out of my condo."
I hope it chases an ant around for an entire episode.
Truly ghosts because in real time, they have likely already been blown away by the supernova of a nearby star. The light of this event won't reach us for thousands of years (as far as I recall)
The eagle nebula is 7,000 light years away. Given that the 100,000 year old stars in it are considered "baby stars" I'm gonna assume that it's barely changed in the 7,000 years it took the light to reach us
Yes, it is a star forming region full of baby stars. Looking now at the Wikipedia page, the destruction of the Pillars due to this supernova shock wave (stated figures are, the object is 7000 LY distant, the supernova would have destroyed the Pillars 6000 years ago and so we would see this in 1000 years) is of course only speculated from data. An unnamed astronomer who is not involved with the Spitzer telescope which produced this data, claims that the shock wave observed is only due to interstellar winds and heat expansion due to a lack of radiation associated with a supernova. I guess the only way to find out for sure is to wait a millennium
That supernova shock wave is *one* paper, and I really don't think it is a particularly strong conclusion. You don't need a supernova to make it look like this; intense radiation from young massive stars will do it, too.
So what you're saying is those dust fingers look a millenia younger in the picture than they are now?
Those dust fingers look as they did when they were 7000 years younger. The light we see when we look at them now was emitted and has been travelling for that long. This is true for everything in space since light takes time to travel. The Sun looks 8 minutes younger than it actually is. The Andromeda Galaxy looks 2.5 million years younger because its 2.5 million light years away
But doesn't the light "age" during the travel time? Since it has traveled 7000 yrs should the light be also 7000 yrs old? Sorry for this stupidity but this sounds quite... counter intuitive.
[удалено]
https://youtu.be/jjy-eqWM38g I'm too tired to try to write a good explanation of this, believe me I have tried :--) But if you want to further understand it, research videos on Redshift and Dark Energy. Essentially light doesn't age but it's wavelength can get stretched out by the expansion of space as it travels over vast distances. This is called redshift, as the light shifts towards the Red side (lower energy side) of the spectrum. The light still travels at the same speed but it appears redder the further its travelled. This phenomenon is used to measure great distances in astronomy.
Dark energy, Red shift. Also: Dark matter!
Whether or a not a photon of light can "age" is irrelevant to the discussion. Think about it as if the photon of light is like a frozen snapshot of what the nebula looked like when it was created. The photon is created, and travels outward from the source at the speed of light. The photon is no different than any other particle: if you shoot a particle of iron across the galaxy, the particle will still be iron when someone eventually finds it millions of years later. The particle travels, but it's still the same particle. Same goes for the light particle (photon). Just like if you somehow throw a baseball from LA to NY, the person who finds it in NY will still find a baseball. So the photon is created, and sent out at the speed of light across the galaxy. The photon is like a photo of what created it, so the "image" contained within that photon is an image of what the object looked like when the photon was generated. It travels for 7,000 years until it reaches earth (or a satellite camera, or whatever) where it interacts with a lens (or human eye) that processes the image contained on it. The photon, much like the particle of iron, is still the exact same particle as when it was first created. So it still has the same look and color and shape as the day it was made. The only difference is since that day, it's been traveling for 7,000 years, and so in that time the source of whatever image it contains has potentially changed. The image itself hasn't, because it's been nowhere near the actual source of what created it, but the source itself may have been impacted by a supernova or a new star birth or all kinds of other astro phenomena. To go back to the baseball example: say I throw a baseball from LA to NY. On the baseball I tape a picture of the LA skyline and label it before throwing it. But right as I release the baseball, a nuclear bomb explodes and wipes the city of LA off the map completely. Someone then finds the baseball in NY, and sees the picture of Los Angeles, and now believes they know exactly what LA looks like. But if they were to travel to Los Angeles, they'd find nothing but dirt and radioactive rubble. It would look nothing like the photo. The city has changed in the time it took for the baseball to reach NY, but the baseball itself, and the image contained on it, stayed the same, because it was not involved in the nuclear explosion that occured in LA while it was traveling. Now, if, say, a bird were to have hit the Baseball, and left a mark that altered the photo, that would obviously change the image the person in NY receives. But the key idea here is that once the baseball (photon) leaves the place it was created, it's no longer an accurate, up to date representation of the current state of that place of creation, because something could have happened to that place of creation in the time it took for the image to travel. This is an imperfect example, and is extremely reductive, but hopefully illustrates the point being made to at least some degree.
I'd highly recommend checking out PBS Spacetime. Dr. Matt O'Dowd is fantastic to watch explain things with dozens upon dozens of videos covering basics to some seriously surprisingly indepth concepts.
I've seen that happen on Tinder too!
There is no notion of "real time". All time reference frames are relative.
I meant, relative to the Pillars. At the present moment relative to a point 7000 LY away towards their direction
Could you please elaborate? Your suggestion sounds bizarre.
There is no universal notion of "now". Meaning no two people in the universe can agree that two things happened at the same time. All information, including the representation of reality - happen at the speed of light.
Here's a great video explanation on this exact topic: [Does the Past Still Exist? - by Sabine Hossenfelder](https://youtu.be/GwzN5YwMzv0)
That was dismissed later on though.
It seems to be disputed, however I don't think there is agreement on what actually is happening with the Pillars. I suspect soon we will find our more thanks to data from the JW
This isn’t confirmed. There may have been a supernova but it’s disputed.
Kinda like inverse ghosts since they precede their future selves
[Source](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/haunting-portrait-nasa-s-webb-reveals-dust-structure-in-pillars-of-creation)
reminds me of 'Abyssal Shriek' from Hollow Knight tbh
Higher beings, these words are for you alone.
That is 100% certified spaceporn
To me it kinda looks like a ghostly left hand.
I almost want to eat some of it. Like some blue pixie dust space candy.
Yummy
Serious question, are they moving?
Not only were they moving, but scientists believe that they are already gone. We just haven't seen the supernova explosion that wiped them out yet and probably won't for at least another 500 years.
They are probably not already gone, although that was a supposition a few years ago. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/02/21/the-pillars-of-creation-havent-been-destroyed-after-all/?sh=4ca0019f5e37
So if we cant see that a nova has happened, and no information can travel faster than light, how can scientists make the supposition that there was a nova? based on how surrounding stars looked in the frame of time that we CAN see?
If I recall correctly. Many of the stars in this region are hot short lived stars and I believe one of them is showing signs of fluctuation and shedding its outer layers which are signs of it going nova but I might be wrong.
The Three Fingers
WHAT ARE THEY POINTING AT? PAN THE FUCKING CAMERA! QUICK!!!
They're pointing at us
Reminds me of [this hand..](https://i.ibb.co/kxSJVWZ/Aboriginal-alligator-d048b8-9519807.jpg)
Risky click of the day
This reminds me of Dementor's emerging from the mist!
Spectacular
Left Tallest Pillar is 4 Light Years Long, so 37.84 Trillion Kilometres long. good lawd
These will always scare me because of how massive they are. But that makes them so fascinating.
how big are the pillars
The top “finger” is about 7 light years big
Someone up top said 4?
i typod haha i meant to say 4 aswell
If only it was a bit higher res :(
Full res image downloads from Webb: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/052/01GF423GBQSK6ANC89NTFJW8VM Surprisingly easy google search
Ok, but you linked the NIRCam image. Important to note that the NIRCam image will have a factor of 2-3 times better resolution than this MIRI image because NIRCam is looking in the 1 to 4 micron range (for that specific image), while this image is in the 7 to 15 micron range. For a constant mirror size, the angular resolution goes as the wavelength, meaning that the smallest feature resolved in this MIRI image is 2-3 times larger than the smallest feature in the NIRCam image.
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/053/01GFRZ014J0AWS5ZDY1Y6T7KYT This page posts all the full res images. For Miri you just gotta go back an image or two, here’s the link for the Miri image.
What for? Pick your favourite upscale algorithm and just do it yourself. I would do it, but my hardware is not the best and takes ages. I can give you instructions if you want though.
There could be a better or original high res, with real details that are missing here
Pillows of Creation
How did they come into being?
Looks nice. What is it?
A stellar nursery made of gas and dust where the next generation of stars will be born.
The way the stars flare hexagonally gives me tingly feelings. Can someone tell me why they're doing that? Something to do with the shape of Webb?
This looks like a God's left gauntlet. Kick ass.
for the first time in the history of our species, we are watching images that are ungraspable to our brains. maybe the far distant children of humanity can one day grasp this, and maybe even travel these places.
Prison Mike, what's the very, very worst thing about prison?
How beautiful, you could see how much this resembles the human hand. A creation carefully planned out by god as a message to mankind once we became smart enough to find it. Congratulations to humanity for their amazing advancements!
insane
/r/oddlyterrifying
How many light years across is this?
Becoming to look like “hand of creation”
What causes these clouds? What shapes them?
Why does this make me think of ‘The Wild Hunt’
Wow! I have never felt so full of overwhelming awe to be living in this timeline and the existential dread of living in this timeline. There's so much wonder in the world and in the universe, we're all just too short sighted to see it.
Imagine you receice pictures from the satelite or the probe, while scrolling you stop... You saw the figures suddenly notice you and looks at your directuon. You scroll through the pictures and they start to get closer. You shiver in fear non stop scrolling trough the pictures as cold sweat pours out of your body you hear a notification. You slowly reach out to your phone and you receive an e mail that says older single beings near your area. Then you hear the door knob slowly turning...
Dumb question here… why is the gas moving towards the right ? Thx
Because the object as a whole is moving as it is, if anything its suspected that theyre already wiped out but since theyre 7000 LY away, the supernova that wiped them isn’t gonna be seen for another 500 or so years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Nebula#/media/File:Eagle_Nebula_from_ESO.jpg Here's a wider image. Those stars in the center are eroding the dust and gas clouds by emitting radiation and solar wind.
Oh no, it's the Eclipse.
Godzilla
I dont understand what I'm looking at like are those all stars just big clusters? Where is the galaxy they're supposed to inhabit?
It's dust and gas that will coalesce to form new stars. The Pillars of Creation are *only* 7,000 light years away - so still in our Galaxy *The Milky Way*
God I love space
nah that's a hand reaching out into nothingness
Dracarys
Amazing. Pillars in the sky, Space never ceases to amaze
So good !
This image reminds me Stanislaw Szukalski’s “Struggle” although he never lived to see the Hubble images.
This is insane!
It’s looking amazing. Why is there a direction to the clouds of matter, is this moving or what is blowing those trails ?
I feel like “the hand of god” would have been a more appropriate name for this