Thursday, Aug 28, 2025

The Pillars of Creation are gigantic structures of gas and interstellar dust located in the Eagle Nebula (M16), about 7,000 light-years from Earth. They span several light-years in length and serve as stellar nurseries, where new stars are forming within dense columns of cold hydrogen. They became famous after the iconic 1995 image from the Hubble Space Telescope, which revealed stunning details of these pillar-shaped clouds that are slowly being eroded by the intense radiation of nearby young stars.