"The Pillars of Creation" is a photograph of interstellar dust and gas in the Eagle Nebula (NGC 6611), some 7,000 light-years away from the Earth. The picture was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on April 1, 1995, and is rated among the top 10 photos taken by the large telescope.
It's not going to look picture-perfect forever, though — the first complete 3D images of the gas pillars, taken in Chile by the European Southern Oservatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope, seem to suggest that that the pillars are going to disappear.
It won't happen anytime soon, though — going by the latest observations, scientists say the structures have about 3 million years until they disappear into cosmic nothingess. Still, on the scale of cosmic time, that's barely a blip.
The pillars are composed of cosmic dust and gas. Their structure, resembling outstretched fingers, took shape with the formation of new stars. The stars born in the region are so massive and hot that they burn into the gas clouds within the nebula.
The explosions of the stars emit strong winds as well as radiation waves, which disperse the gases. The powerful radiation and winds push down the shields of dense gas.
According to the ESO, denser pockets of gas and dust can tolerate this kind of erosion for longer — but the intense radiation from the stars is wearing away at the pillars.
"It seems that an equally apt name for these iconic cosmic columns might be the Pillars of Destruction," the ESO said in a statement. The ESO's Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on the Very Large Telescope revealed that the cosmic structure is losing energy about 70 times the mass of our the sun every 1 million years.
An image released in 2007 led to the theory that the structures were already destroyed about 6,000 years ago. Some scientists believe that a supernova shockwave may have ripped the structures apart — which we wouldn't see yet, as the nebula is 7,000 light-years away. The new study, however, is centered on destruction by gradual erosion, which means the pillars are still around — just not forever.
This study was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center | Flickr
