NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope images the Pillars of Creation like you’ve never seen before. What you see are new stars being forming within dense clouds of gas and dust, while the rock formation-like pillars are actually made up of cool interstellar material that appears to be semi-transparent in near-infrared light.
Webb used its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to capture bright red orbs that normally have diffraction spikes and lie outside one of the dusty pillars. When knots with sufficient mass are formed within the pillars of gas and dust, they begin to collapse under their own gravity before slowly heating up again and forming new stars. The wavy lines you see that resemble lava at the edges of some pillars are ejections from stars that are still forming within the gas and dust.
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Although it may appear that near-infrared light has allowed Webb to ‘pierce through’ the clouds to reveal great cosmic distances beyond the pillars, there are no galaxies in this view. Instead, a mix of translucent gas and dust known as the interstellar medium in the densest part of our Milky Way galaxy’s disk blocks our view of the deeper universe,” said NASA.
