The Eagle Has … Arrived

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We’re still a few days out from the 40th anniversary of the touchdown of Apollo 11’s lunar lander, the Eagle. (The launch went off 40 years and just an hour or so ago.)

Presumably to hold us over, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has released this stunning new image of the Eagle Nebula.

Located 7000 light-years away, towards the constellation of Serpens (the Snake), the Eagle Nebula is a dazzling stellar nursery, a region of gas and dust where young stars are currently being formed and where a cluster of massive, hot stars, NGC 6611, has just been born. The powerful light and strong winds from these massive new arrivals are shaping light-year long pillars, seen in the image partly silhouetted against the bright background of the nebula. The nebula itself has a shape vaguely reminiscent of an eagle, with the central pillars being the “talons.”

The star cluster was discovered by the Swiss astronomer Jean Philippe Loys de Chéseaux in 1745–46. It was independently rediscovered about 20 years later by the French comet hunter Charles Messier, who included it as number 16 in his famous catalogue and remarked that the stars were surrounded by a faint glow. The Eagle Nebula achieved iconic status in 1995, when its central pillars were depicted in this stunning image obtained with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

The newly released image, obtained with the Wide-Field Imager camera attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile, covers an area on the sky as large as the full Moon, and is more than 200 times more extensive than the iconic Hubble visible-light image. The whole region around the pillars can now be seen in exquisite detail.

The “Pillars of Creation” are in the middle of the image, with the cluster of young stars, NGC 6611, lying above and to the right. The “Spire” — another pillar captured by Hubble — is at the center left of the image.

Finger-like features protrude from the vast cloud wall of cold gas and dust, not unlike stalagmites rising from the floor of a cave. Inside the pillars, the gas is dense enough to collapse under its own weight, forming young stars. These light-year long columns of gas and dust are being simultaneously sculpted, illuminated and destroyed by the intense ultraviolet light from massive stars in NGC 6611, the adjacent young stellar cluster. Within a few million years — a mere blink of the universal eye — they will be gone forever.

Source: ESO. More videos there allow you to zoom in on the Eagle Nebula, pan across it, or cross-fade into several views — all while listening to music that is quite ethereal.