14 DAY TRIAL // If you are done staring at the image above and picking your jaw up off the floor (nothing to worry about, that's the usual reaction to this picture), perhaps we might proceed to season your amazement with just a dash of science.
First off, it must be said that the image above (yes, you can look at it again) was obtained back in 1995 with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, which was then observing a stellar nursery inside the Eagle Nebula.
According to astronomers, the Eagle Nebula is located at a distance of about 7,000 light-years from our planet, and it comprises both star-forming regions made up of gas and dust, and several fully formed stars.
The “pillars of creation” featured in the image above, which some like to call “elephant trunks,” are believed to have come into being when cooler interstellar gas was eroded by intense radiation and winds originating from massive stars.
The stars that researchers have in mind are about 16 times greater than our Sun and are estimated to have a surface temperature of about 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 30,000 degrees Celsius). Their official name is O-type stars.
Astronomer Scott Balfour with Cardiff University in the United Kingdom now claims to have confirmed this theory concerning the formation of the “pillars of creation” by remaking the structures in a computer simulation.
As detailed on the official website for the Royal Astronomical Society, what the researcher basically did was to simulate the formation of a O-type star inside a gas cloud. All in all, he condensed 1.6 million years of cosmic phenomena into several weeks of computing time.
He thus found that the formation of massive stars inside gas clouds births bubbles of heated interstellar gas that can expand indefinitely or expand and then contract back to the center of the cloud. One other possibility is for them to grow, shrink a little, and then remain static.
Interestingly enough, this computer simulation pieced together by the Cardiff University scientist translated into the formation of structures very much similar to the iconic “elephant trunks” imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.
“The model neatly produces exactly the same kind of structures seen by astronomers in the classic 1995 image, vindicating the idea that giant O-type stars have a major effect in sculpting their surroundings,” he says. Thus, such pillars appear to form along the outer edge of heated bubbles as they break up.
Besides that, Scott Balfour's study also revealed that O-type stars help bring other stars to life by compressing gas. As the researcher puts it, “If I'm right, it means that O-type and other massive stars play a much more complex role than we previously thought in nursing a new generation of stellar siblings to life.”