‘OH. MY. UNIVERSE.’

NASA’s Webb Telescope Captures ‘Pillars of Creation’ in Stunning Detail

The magnificent column-shaped clouds of interstellar dust and gas, some 6,500 light-years away, were first photographed in 1995.

The James Webb Space Telescope has given humanity an astonishing new perspective of the cosmos, releasing on Wednesday a new image of cloudy cosmic ballet known as the Pillars of Creations. In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope—the Webb’s predecessor—first captured the pillars, towering columns of gas and dust located in the heart of the Eagle Nebula’s Sepens constellation, some 6,500 light-years away. The Hubble repeated the act in 2014, revealing the mountainous structures in sharper and wider clarity. The Webb, with its Near-Infrared Camera, which allows it access to wavelengths that afford scientists a peek into distant galaxies, has photographed the pillars in still greater detail, revealing hundreds of dazzling, previously invisible stars. Many of these stars are newborns, being just a few hundred thousand years ago, according to the space agency, which added the new image would allow astronomers to better theorize how stars form and die. “Oh. My. Universe,” tweeted David Grinspoons, a Planetary Science Institute astrobiologist.