Pillars of Creation

Pillars of Creation is a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, in the Serpens constellation, some 6,500–7,000 light-years (2,000–2,100 pc; 61–66 Em) from Earth.

[8] The name is based on a phrase used by Charles Spurgeon in his 1857 sermon "The Condescension of Christ":[9] In calling the Hubble's spectacular new image of the Eagle Nebula the Pillars of Creation, NASA scientists were tapping a rich symbolic tradition with centuries of meaning, bringing it into the modern age.

When William Jennings Bryan published The World's Famous Orations in 1906, he included an 1857 sermon by London pastor Charles Haddon Spurgeon titled "The Condescension of Christ".

"The pillars are composed of cool molecular hydrogen and dust that are being eroded by photoevaporation from the ultraviolet light of relatively close and hot stars.

[10] The finger-like protrusions at the top of the clouds are larger than the Solar System, and are made visible by the shadows of evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs), which shield the gas behind them from intense UV flux.

Images taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope uncovered a cloud of dust in the vicinity of the Pillars of Creation that hypothetically could be a shock wave produced by a supernova.

[18] The photograph was made with light emitted by different elements in the cloud and appears as a different color in the composite image: green for hydrogen, red for singly ionized sulfur and blue for double-ionized oxygen atoms.

[8] In October 2022, it was unveiled that the James Webb Space Telescope captured a new image of the Pillars of Creation utilizing the NIRCam aboard the spacecraft.