The 'Pillars of Creation' Across Light and Time
Submitted by chandra on Fri, 2025-03-28 10:59'Pillars of Creation' Over Time
Credit: 1995: Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/ASU/J.Hester & P.Scowen; 2015/2018: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/M.Guarcello et al., Optical: NASA/STScI; 2023/2024: X-ray: NASA/CXO/SAO, Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI, Image processing: L. Frattare; Sonification: NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida)

1995 Hubble Space Telescope Image of
the 'Pillars of Creation'
Credit: NASA, ESA, Jeff Hester, and Paul Scowen (Arizona State University)
Nearly 30 years ago, in 1995, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured an image that would become one of the most recognizable in astronomy: towering columns of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, sculpted by intense stellar winds and radiation. Dubbed the “Pillars of Creation,” this image reshaped how we visualize star formation, appearing everywhere from textbooks to T-shirts.
But the story of the Pillars didn’t end there. Over the decades, astronomers have returned to this region with Hubble and more telescopes, peeling back new layers of its story. Earlier in its mission, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory looked for the high-energy signatures of young stars inside the Pillars themselves, revealing that massive newborn stars—thought to be actively forming inside the Pillars—were surprisingly absent. This raised the question: are the Pillars past their star-forming prime since young stars are usually strong X-ray sources? Chandra's sharp X-ray vision does allow it to identify hundreds of very young stars in the region and others still in the process of forming (known as "protostars").