Famous “Pillars of Creation” will disappear in three million years – Terra Brazil

The “Pillars of Creation”, the giant clouds of gas and dust located in the Eagle Nebula, about 7,000 light years from Earth, disappear completely in three million years, according to research from an international team of astronomers.

The work, published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society”, is supported in the first three-dimensional image of these famous columns of cosmic dust, which reveals its “imminent” destruction, reported in a statement Observatory European Southern (ESO, its acronym in English).

With the help of the instrument “MUSE” installed on large telescope (VLT, in English) of ESO in Chile, astronomers saw that the “Pillars of Creation” lose every million years equivalent 70 times the solar mass.

From a current mass of 200 times that of the sun, “is expected to have a lifespan of perhaps three million years – a blink of an eye in cosmic time,” said the Observatory.

From this new discovery, the astronomers suggest re-baptize the famous cosmic columns as the “Pillars of Destruction.”

The new three-dimensional illustration of three famous pillars reveals new details about their spatial distribution, as well as evidence of two stars in the making in the left column and the center and an unprecedented coming jet from a young star so far he had not been seen.

The columns were carved over time as a result of powerful erosive radiation and stellar winds that bright height of the stars cause after her pregnancy, driving out the less dense material away from your neighborhood.

In this case, the most dense clumps of gas and dust can resist this erosion acting as a shield that creates “rows” or dark “elephant trunks” and is what can be seen as the body dark a pillar that points to the bright stars.

The astronomers hope to better understand how the kind of young O and B stars influence the formation of stars of later generations.

Several studies have identified protostars forming these clouds, so they can continue being called “Pillars of Creation,” the ESO.

The original image of the famous pillars, obtained by the Hubble telescope, was made two decades ago and immediately became one of its most recognized cosmic images.