James Webb Telescope captures a clearer "Pillars of Creation"
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NASA picture.
Washington DC: The James Webb Space Telescope has captured the Pillars of Creation (PoC), the most celebrated and awe-inspiring cosmic object of colossal spires of interstellar gas and dust, with more depth., clarity and colour, The Indian Express reported.
The PoC was first captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb's predecessor, in 1995. Now, the new rendering of the cosmic structure by Webb was released on Wednesday by the American space agency NASA.
The fresh images of the PoC feature vast, towering columns of dense clouds constituted of dust and gas. Here new stars are forming in a region called the Eagle Nebula, which is located at the Serpens Constellation, around 6,500 light-years from Earth.
The Webb renderings have caught popular culture, getting featured on everyday objects like T-shirts, coffee mugs etc.
Hubble telescope attempted to a sharper image in 2014 with visible-light optics, but this time Webb employed its near-infrared spectrum to render PoC with greater translucency. This gave an impressive result, making many more stars visible along with the more clear view of the contours of the clouds.
NASA said that the fresh pictures would aid researchers in "revamp their models of star formation by identifying far more precise counts of newly formed stars, along with the quantities of gas and dust in the region," TIE quoted NASA from the material accompanying the published pictures.
Describing the pictures, NASA said that the bright red spheres located outside the pillars are baby stars. These large loops of gas and dust that have collapsed under their own gravity slowly heated up to give birth to new stellar bodies. The wavy crimson line, looking like lava, at the fringes of some pillars are ejections of matter from forming stars, and they were only a few hundred thousand years old.
The James Webb Telescope, a $9 billion project under making for around two decades under contract for NASA by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp, was launched into space on December 2021, partnering with European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency. It reached its destined orbit, one million miles away from Earth, after a month. The project is expected to aid scientists in unfolding the secrets of the begging of the universe.