NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) just keeps streaming the hits back to Earth. This time, data from the MIRI mid-infrared instrument onboard JWST shows a haunting view of the Pillars of Creation. Thousands of stars are embedded in those pillars, but many are “invisible” to MIRI. In the lat
exploded in the area. If it did, there’s little evidence of the shock wave hurting the stellar newborns or evaporating the rest of the cloud away.The latest steely gray view of the Pillars of Creation set against the glowing red and gray backdrop isn’t JWST’s first rodeo with this region of space. Earlier in October, the science teams released a NIRCam image of it. That view revealed many of the protostars forming inside those cosmic stalagmites in space.
The protostars as seen by NIRCam are the ones with multiple diffraction spikes. They’re still accreting mass, and when they get enough, they’ll collapse under their own gravity and slowly heat up. When they’re hot and massive enough, fusion will ignite in their cores. That’s when they become stars. The young stars in these pillars are probably only a few hundred thousand years old and won’t be finished forming for millions of years.
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