It's Full Of Stars

October 19, 2022 12:13 PM

NASA has shared a new image, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope [previously] of the iconic Pillars Of Creation first captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.
posted by mhoye (33 comments total)

Stunning.

I know someone who believes that there are aliens who have visited this planet in physical bodies. I look at this — at the scope and scale of both time and distance captured here in this tiny, tiny piece of Everything, and all I can think is that the person simply has no real understanding of the absolute magnitude of the universe. This picture is both exhi and humbling.
posted by Silvery Fish at 12:28 PM on October 19, 2022 [11 favorites]

Sauron!
posted by mono blanco at 12:31 PM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

That's how I felt when I first put on glasses in junior high, thoroughburro. "But the world isn't that sharp!!"
posted by clawsoon at 1:07 PM on October 19, 2022 [8 favorites]

All those edges and filmy bits... I dunno, I wouldn't eat that chorizo.
posted by jackbishop at 1:07 PM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Anybody know if they've been able to fix that thing that got stuck?
posted by clawsoon at 1:09 PM on October 19, 2022

Maybe dumb question.... is the gas and dust in motion and if so, why are these structures still the same shape? Is it just because it's unfathomably massive?
posted by Glinn at 1:24 PM on October 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Jaw dropping. I had Hubble's image as a Zoom background for a while, and no one believed it was an actual image.

This one...I don't even know what to say.
posted by Gorgik at 1:30 PM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Is it just because it's unfathomably massive?
The pillars are roughly 4 to 5 light-years in length, so I'd say pretty unfathomable!
posted by onehalfjunco at 1:31 PM on October 19, 2022 [12 favorites]

Extra points to mhoye for the post title.
posted by heatherlogan at 1:42 PM on October 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

The pillars are roughly 4 to 5 light-years in length, so I'd say pretty unfathomable!

Incorrect! Five light years is 25,865,951,642,007,880 fathoms.
posted by kirkaracha at 1:45 PM on October 19, 2022 [41 favorites]

I mean, I can't that many fathoms.
posted by biogeo at 2:03 PM on October 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

That's some lens flare that would make JJ Abrams blush! Umm, I mean ... diffraction spikes.
posted by credulous at 2:12 PM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Am I correct that the Hubble image would be closer to what we'd see (especially in terms of how much we'd see), since JWST is seeing through a lot of dust that we wouldn't see through?
posted by clawsoon at 2:21 PM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

I have to say, looking at the uncountable profusion of stars in the background is giving me a bit of Total Perspective Vortex dread. Unfathomable doesn’t begin to cover it.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 2:33 PM on October 19, 2022 [6 favorites]

is the gas and dust in motion and if so, why are these structures still the same shape?

According to wikipedia the Pillars are 6500-7000 light years distant. The Hubble image was only taken 27 years ago so unless something really insane just happened to occur out there in the last 27 years, we're not likely to see much change in terms of shape/size. Probably ever.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:55 PM on October 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

Places where there are a whole bunch of stars relatively near each other must think of places like our solar system as the boonies.
posted by clawsoon at 3:32 PM on October 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

I dunno: they might think of places like ours as quiet and conducive to formation of carbon-based life on planets with simple elliptical orbits around a single stable main sequence sun.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 3:43 PM on October 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

The dinosaurs ars still asking "Why?"
posted by Oyéah at 3:43 PM on October 19, 2022

As it happens, at least a partial answer to that question was given in the latest Rick and Morty episode!
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:53 PM on October 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

clawsoon you are correct that the Hubble image is closer to what we would see (though its brightness has been amped up through a long-duration exposure; our colour vision isn't that sensitive in low light). JWST "sees" in the infrared, which is then false-coloured into the visible for our viewing pleasure.
posted by heatherlogan at 5:12 PM on October 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

Although it was (wrongly) theorized that the Pillars were destroyed by various cosmic processes in the 7000 years it took for their light to reach Hubble, they changed in relatively small ways from 1995 to 2015:

The Pillars Of Creation Haven't Been Destroyed, After All, Ethan Siegel, Forbes, Feb 21 2018

[2015 image & 1995 image]
This image compares two views of the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation taken with Hubble 20 years apart. The new image, on the left, captures almost exactly the same region as in the 1995, on the right. However, the newer image uses Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, installed in 2009, to capture light from glowing oxygen, hydrogen, and sulphur with greater clarity. Having both images allows astronomers to study how the structure of the pillars is changing over time.
WFC3: NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team WFPC2: NASA, ESA/Hubble, STScI, J. Hester and P. Scowen (Arizona State University)

...in 2015, to celebrate Hubble's 25th anniversary in space, NASA revisited these pillars, and the 20 year baseline between the original 1995 image and the new 2015 one provided insights that strongly refuted the already-destroyed pillars theory.

The 20-year follow-up showcased not only features that couldn't be seen before, such as additional details, greater wavelength coverage, and a larger field of view. But the greatest and most important advance is the fact that the 20-year baseline allowed us to view changes over time. In the tip of the largest pillar, for example, we were able to not only identify an ejected jet, but to track the extent of its changes. With the incredible resolution of Hubble, we could determine that the size of it, over that additional time, expanded by an extra 100 billion kilometers: 1000 times the Earth-Sun distance, meaning that the stream is moving at 200 km/s.

[Side-by-side images w/changes]
Subtle changes in the gas structure of the top pillar showcase an outflow that likely originates from a newborn, massive star inside the pillar. This is consistent with the location of a new star measured previously by Chandra.
NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Most importantly, however, is that unlike when the 1995 image was taken, the more modern data that was taken came when Hubble had a new, advanced camera installed on it. This included not only the same visible-light range that the old WFPC2 camera had, but a new slew of infrared filters that went out to double the maximum wavelength of the prior, old image. Owing to this, we were able to look "through" the pillars themselves, to the stars behind them. And, perhaps more importantly, to the evaporating gas that's being burned off by the stars and cataclysmic events contained therein.
...
What we can also do, however, is measure and quantify the rate-of-evaporation of these pillars, from both internal and external radiation combined. Changes between the images indicate that the pillars are still intact today, even though the light we’re seeing came from 7,000 years ago.

[Animated gif]
By rotating and stretching these two images relative to one another, the changes from 1995 to 2015 can be overlaid. Contrary to the expectations of many, the evaporative process is slow and small.
WFC3: NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team WFPC2: NASA, ESA/Hubble, STScI, J. Hester and P. Scowen (Arizona State University)
...

More details in the article.

Baby steps, grasshopper, baby steps.
posted by cenoxo at 5:28 PM on October 19, 2022 [12 favorites]

Well, I'll be damned. Thanks, cenoxo!
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 5:46 PM on October 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Zoom into Webb’s View of the Pillars of Creation (YT). View it full screen for the best effect.
posted by cenoxo at 8:05 PM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

In addition to everything else, I'm fascinated that huge regions of gas in space show the same sort of eddies that smoke does on earth, just bigger and slower.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 2:38 AM on October 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

You know what would be cool? Beyond false colouring, letting one of the AI's loose on finding a way to show exactly what a human would see if they were looking at the image at this magnification - removing the 'diffraction spikes' on the stars would be a big plus.
posted by domdib at 5:43 AM on October 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

LibreTexts Physics > Book: Astronomy (OpenStax) > 20: Between the Stars - Gas and Dust in Space, last updated Apr 9, 2022:

Where do stars come from? We already know from earlier chapters that stars must die because ultimately they exhaust their nuclear fuel. We might hypothesize that new stars come into existence to replace the ones that die. In order to form new stars, however, we need the raw material to make them. It also turns out that stars eject mass throughout their lives (a kind of wind blows from their surface layers) and that material must go somewhere. What does this “raw material” of stars look like? How would you detect it, especially if it is not yet in the form of stars and cannot generate its own energy?

One of the most exciting discoveries of twentieth-century astronomy was that our Galaxy contains vast quantities of this “raw material”—atoms or molecules of gas and tiny solid dust particles found between the stars. Studying this diffuse matter between the stars helps us understand how new stars form and gives us important clues about our own origins billions of years ago.

Sub-topic links follow in the article.
posted by cenoxo at 7:13 AM on October 20, 2022

Extra points to mhoye for the post title.

Completely agree, and it seems to be a bit of a mefi favorite. Including a 19 year old post to the Hubble gallery!
posted by jermsplan at 12:11 PM on October 20, 2022

I wish the descriptions had a little more context about the relative distances of what we see in the photo.

1. The description says this is in a dense part of our galaxy, so we're not seeing galaxies beyond the Pillars. But are most of the stars that seem to be "inside" the Pillars actually inside the cloud or are they a mix of stars behind and in front of it (significantly further or closer to us than the Pillars)?

2. I assume most of the really big-looking stars with prominent diffraction spikes are much closer stars between us and the Pillars?

3. How "deep" are those clouds? Do they extend toward and away from us as much as from side to side? Are the pillars roughly (irregularly) spherical?
posted by straight at 7:39 PM on October 20, 2022

Wow. I zoom all the way in to a tiny dark bit of the corner. There are thousands of stars on my screen. Many—probably most—have planets around them.
posted by straight at 8:04 PM on October 20, 2022

How many stars are there in space?, Brian Jackson, The Conversation, September 20 2021:

…Before calculating the number of stars in the universe, astronomers first have to estimate the number of galaxies. To do that, they take very detailed pictures of small parts of the sky and count all the galaxies they see in those pictures. That number is then multiplied by the number of pictures needed to photograph the whole sky. The answer: There are approximately 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe – that’s 2 trillion.
…
Astronomers don’t know exactly how many stars are in each of those 2 trillion galaxies. Most are so distant, there’s no way to tell precisely. But we can make a good guess at the number of stars in our own Milky Way … Red, white and blue stars give off different amounts of light. By measuring that starlight – specifically, its color and brightness – astronomers can estimate how many stars our galaxy holds. With that method,they discovered the Milky Way has about 100 billion stars – 100,000,000,000.
…
Using the Milky Way as our model, we can multiply the number of stars in a typical galaxy (100 billion) by the number of galaxies in the universe (2 trillion). The answer is an absolutely astounding number. There are approximately 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. Or, to put it another way, 200 sextillion. That’s 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!
…
Think about that the next time you’re looking at the night sky – and then wonder about what might be happening on the trillions of worlds orbiting all those stars.

Star Light, Star Bright…
posted by cenoxo at 10:00 PM on October 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

then wonder about what might be happening on the trillions of worlds orbiting all those stars.

Quadrillions of extraterrestrials shaking their fists Earthward for polluting their radio waves with our reality TV transmissions, probably.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:31 PM on October 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

WebbCompare.com has interactive sliders showing new Webb astrophotographs over their previous Hubble images. Vive la différence!
posted by cenoxo at 5:23 AM on October 21, 2022

Today's APOD is a photo of the California Nebula. This nebula is huge (100 light years across) and near (just 1500 light years away). So it takes up a huge amount of sky, about 3 degrees which is about six times the apparent diameter of the Moon. You can't see the nebula, though, because it's very faint and red (our eyes are less sensitive to red light). This photo was probably taken with a camera (not through a telescope) with an exposure of an hour or more, using a telescope mount to track the object as it drifted across the sky. Your eyes can't do an hour exposure. That would be amazing though--there's a ton of big faint shit.
posted by neuron at 11:18 AM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]