Pillars of Creation

These towering columns of cosmic gas and dust stretch across several light-years in the Eagle Nebula, about 6,500 light-years from Earth. Known as the "Pillars of Creation," this formation captured by NASA's space telescopes shows stellar nurseries where new stars are being born. The pillars are sculpted by intense ultraviolet light and stellar winds from massive young stars outside the frame, which slowly erode the dense clouds while simultaneously triggering star formation within them. The warm golden and amber tones reveal cooler dust and gas, while the blue glow highlights hotter regions. First made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, this updated image combines infrared observations that peer through the obscuring dust to reveal even more detail. The dark, finger-like protrusions jutting from the pillars are denser pockets of material that have resisted erosion better than their surroundings. Despite their ethereal, almost sculptural beauty, these pillars are temporary cosmic structures, destined to be gradually worn away by the radiation of nearby stars over the next few million years.