Description
The most sharp-sighted eye of mankind — the Edwin Hubble Space Telescope — is most famous for this photograph: in the foggy starry bezna, the dark obelisks of the universal void, framed by the mesmerizing radiance of stardust, stretch upward like the spread fingers of a giant. This is the central part of the Eagle Nebula in the constellation Serpent. The entire nebula is incomparably larger than this "tiny" area. Well, you just need to know that the constellation of the Serpent is the only constellation on the star map, divided into two parts — "head" and "tail".
The Eagle Nebula sits in the tail, in the star-rich arm of the Milky Way, adjacent to many other interesting objects. But it was here that astronomers found an absolutely striking cosmic beauty that is now clearly perceived as the hallmark of the Hubble Telescope. The day is not far off when this unique astronomical instrument will be de-orbited and flooded in the ocean, but it will be remembered for a very long time by the photograph of the "Pillars of Creation" — this is how the people of the Earth have called this inner part of the M16 nebula, in which active star formation takes place. and a whole star cluster has already been born.
In fact, the "Pillars of Creation" are more consistent with the properties of the tunnels. Young stars, recently formed from hydrogen filling the Eagle nebula, no longer absorb gas from the surrounding space, but, on the contrary, inflate it from themselves in different directions with their radiation. And since the stars also fly in space relative to the nebula that gave rise to them, it would not be a big mistake to liken each of them to a snowblower, which, moving along the snow-covered virgin soil, paves the way.
The "pillars" are formed by the cluster's four bright stars. And therefore there are four of them — pillars (or interstellar tunnels?). True, one is very short, and he gets lost between the others.
The dimensions of the pillars are quite impressive. The "height" of the extreme pillar is the same as the distance from the Sun to Alpha Centauri — about four and a half light years. And they made such a "stellar tunnel" in about 5-6 million years. You can estimate the speed of movement: slightly slower than one light-year in a million years. And this is not very fast, even by our — human — standards. For example, the Sun moves about 100 times faster among the stars around us. Satellites in low Earth orbit travel 30 times faster. And these stars just drifted slowly through the nebula, and over millions of years they created such beauty.
But beauty is impermanent. The Universe seems to us to be frozen. Our ancient ancestors were sure that the arrangement of the stars visible in the firmament was originally, and will always be. Indeed, sometimes very little changes during the life of a person in space. But the dignity of an intelligent being is also that it can look into the future by calculating it.
In the case of the "Pillars of Creation", the latter statement seems paradoxical, because we see a very outdated version of them — such as they were captured by the Hubble telescope, they were 7,000 years ago — it takes a long time for a ray of light to convey to us the visual appearance of this nebula ... And exactly at the moment when you read these lines, and perhaps even listen to music dedicated to the "Pillars of Creation", their appearance is already different ...
Perhaps they are no longer there.
The "Pillars of Creation" was not only studied by the Hubble Telescope. Recently, another space telescope, Spitzer, which operates in the infrared (thermal) range of the spectrum, discovered a rapidly expanding cloud of hot dust behind the Pillars. Apparently this is a shock wave from a supernova explosion, which flared up a thousand years earlier. And now the "cosmic tsunami" generated by it will pass over the fragile statue of the "Pillars of Creation". It turns out that we are looking at cosmic structures, now destroyed.
All processes in the Universe have their own importance. And if the Eagle nebula gave birth to stars, which in turn created an amazing creation of stardust and starlight, then an expanding cloud of matter from a deceased star, a supernova, will enrich this region of the Galaxy with heavier elements from which planets will arise. And on the planets life will arise over time — it is possible that it is intelligent.
