Pillars of Creation Date: 1 Apr 1985 For over twenty years the
Hubble Space Telescope has taken many wonderful images from
comet crashes to distant galaxies, including this iconic image
of gas pillars in the Eagle Nebula (M16) These eerie, dark
pillar-like structures are columns of cool interstellar hydrogen
gas and dust that are also incubators for new stars. The pillars
protrude from the interior wall of a dark molecular cloud like
stalagmites from the floor of a cavern. They are part of the
"Eagle Nebula" (also called M16 - the 16th object in Charles
Messier's 18th century catalog of "fuzzy" objects that aren't
comets), a nearby star-forming region 6,500 light-years away in
the constellation Serpens. The pillars are in some ways akin to
buttes in the desert, where basalt and other dense rock have
protected a region from erosion, while the surrounding landscape
has been worn away over millennia. In this celestial case, it is
especially dense clouds of molecular hydrogen gas (two atoms of
hydrogen in each mo