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Star-forming region

Pillars of Creation (Eagle Nebula)

One of the most famous pictures in astronomy. The James Webb Space Telescope photographed the pillars afresh in 2022 – in infrared you can see the young stars inside them.

▶ View in the 3D model

Key figures

Distance

about 6,500 light-years

Height of the tallest pillar

about 4 light-years

Constellation

Serpens

Famous since

Hubble image of 1995

Interesting facts

• The pillars are made of cold gas and dust. The radiation from nearby stars is slowly eating them away – in a few hundred thousand years they will be gone.

A stellar nursery

At the tips of the pillars, gas is clumping together into new stars. The red dots in the Webb image are such stars, only just being born.

Where is it?

Pillars of Creation (Eagle Nebula) belongs to the “The Milky Way” level of the Cosmic Zoom (field of view about 130,000 light-years). Our galaxy: a spiral of 100 to 400 billion stars. The Sun lies in the Orion Arm, 26,000 light-years from the centre. All the neighbouring stars from the previous level are inside the tiny dot at “Sun”.

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