New images (see below) provide excellent wide view of the M16, a small region in the Eagle Nebula, located about 6,500 light years from Earth.
M16 pillars consist of cold hydrogen gas and dust. They forced a hotbed of star formation - not unlike the environment in which our Sun was born.
Clusters of massive stars inside pillars emit radiation and produce strong winds that "sandblast" from the top of the column.
Views:
Concerned Individual
This is amazing and intriguing. We should get a bigger and newer telescope up in orbit to get even better pictures.
Rusty White
The Hubble Telescope is one the few examples of taxpayer money well spent. We get the biggest bang for the buck from NASA.
death_au
This made me think of a premise for a new sci-fi story, where humanity invents faster-than-light travel, then pops over to different places in the universe and "using magic telescopes capable of focusing on Earth and seeing details" spies on Earth's past and updates history books.
