In the heart of the Eagle Nebula, about 7000 light-years away, three giant pillars of gas and dust rise — the Pillars of Creation. Their shape is familiar to many from Hubble Space Telescope images. Now, Webb's infrared camera has allowed us to peer inside these dense cocoons where stars are born. Astronomers counted 253 candidate young stellar objects — clumps of gas and dust that are about to ignite or have already begun to shine.
The young stars are not distributed randomly. They cluster along sharp boundaries where radiation meets a dense wall of gas. This is like the way the sea surf washes sand, leaving a scatter of shells at the waterline. Moreover, a faint trend is seen: the farther from the source of harsh radiation, the younger the found stars on average. Over the last million years, the star formation rate here seems to have accelerated. All this hints that some of the stars may have been born not just simultaneously with the central cluster, but under the influence of a shock wave — when external pressure compressed the gas to critical density.
The most impressive details appear at the tips of two pillars. There, tiny disks twisted into spirals and double reflection nebulae, clouds shining by reflected light from hidden stars, are visible. These structures resemble miniature galaxies and suggest that star birth is not just a fall of matter, but a complex dance involving magnetic fields, rotation, and outflows. Maxwell once linked electricity and magnetism with equations; here, gravity, radiation pressure, and gas motion intertwine, creating a picture worthy of his legacy.
The Pillars of Creation may actually no longer exist: according to some data, a nearby supernova explosion could have scattered them about 6000 years ago, but the light of that catastrophe has not yet reached us.
In Stanisław Lem's novel "Solaris," the ocean creates complex structures from matter; the Pillars of Creation are a natural analog of such architecture, sculpted by stellar wind.