Seventy-five hundred light-years away, infant stars light up immense swirls of gas and dust to form what astronomers have named the “Pillars of Destruction.”
Scientists at the European Southern Observatory spied the cloud formation within the Carina Nebula complex, which numbers among the largest spawning grounds for stars yet discovered in the Milky Way galaxy. The researchers announced the discovery of these clouds Wednesday, showing off the pillars with radiant images taken by the Very Large Telescope in Chile.
New stars are born from collapsing clouds of interstellar material. From within, the young heavenly bodies begin to eat away at the mother cloud, bathing gas molecules in radiation so strong it can slice electrons free from the atoms. Nearby, too, already-formed stars blast the clouds with powerful emissions.
The Pillars of Destruction’s spires, also called elephant trunks, are about three light-years tall. That is so immense as to be essentially incomprehensible, about three-quarters the distance between our sun and the next closest star, Proxima Centauri.
A pillar of gas and dust, three light-years tall, which is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. (A. McLeod/EPA/ESO)
The name was a reference to one of the most famous images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, the 1995 discovery of the Pillars of Creation in M16, a region of the Eagle Nebula. Although they may sound like different ends of a spectrum — cosmic life and cosmic death — both of these new images and the Hubble pictures are the flip sides of similar phenomena. (It is a matter of perspective: Pillars of Destruction refers to the cloud, and Creation to the stars.)
“There is the only one thing that can light up a neighborhood like this: massive stars kicking out enough horsepower in ultraviolet light to ionize the gas clouds and make them glow,” said Arizona State University’s Paul Scowen in January 2015, reflecting on the 20th anniversary of his Hubble observation, with fellow astronomer Jeff Hester, of the Pillars of Creation. “Nebulous star-forming regions like M16 are the interstellar neon signs that say, ‘We just made a bunch of massive stars here.’”
As the radiation plucks electrons from the clouds, the gas disperses, a process called photoevaporation. But the European Southern Observatory scientists also noted that the complex dance of radiation and solar winds within these clouds are not fully understood. It is possible, according to the ESO, that radiation also shoves the gas into denser pockets, creating the right conditions for new stars.
A team of astronomers at the ESO, led by PhD student Anna Faye McLeod, said they were able to directly link the energetic output of the newly formed stars to the illuminated destruction of the clouds: As the stars produced more ionizing radiation, the pillars dissipated at higher rates. McLeod and her colleagues recently published the findings in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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