Pillars of Creation

At a glance

Key points

Hubble made them famous in 1995; Webb revisited them in 2022.

• Stars forming inside the columns
• Hubble 1995, Webb 2022
• About 6,500 light-years away

What the colours mean

In Webb's near-infrared image, crimson knots at the pillar edges are jets from newborn stars shocking the gas. The colours are assigned to infrared filters and are not what an eye would see.

Where they are

The pillars sit inside the Eagle Nebula, M16. Jean-Philippe Loys de Chéseaux found its star cluster, NGC 6611, in 1745, and that cluster is what lights the scene: its hot, massive stars flood the surrounding cloud with ultraviolet light. Gas at the surface is boiled away, while dense knots at the tips of the columns shield the material behind them. The tallest pillar is about 4 to 5 light-years long, roughly the distance from the Sun to Alpha Centauri.

Hubble in 1995 and 2014

Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen's 1995 image, taken with Hubble's WFPC2 camera, made the pillars one of the best-known pictures in astronomy. Hubble went back with its sharper Wide Field Camera 3 in 2014, in visible and near-infrared light. Comparing the two epochs shows streamers of gas bleeding off the columns as starlight heats them, and the near-infrared version turned the pillars into wispy silhouettes, revealing stars behind and inside them.

Webb's two views

Webb's near-infrared camera, NIRCam, sees through much of the dust, so the October 2022 image is crowded with stars and shows newborn stars at the pillar edges. Days later its mid-infrared instrument, MIRI, did the opposite: most stars drop out and the dust itself glows, mapping the raw material for future stars. No background galaxies appear in either, because the nebula's gas and dust block the view of the distant universe.

Observing it

M16 lies in Serpens, near the border with Sagittarius, and its cluster shines at about magnitude 6. Binoculars show a small cluster wrapped in faint haze; the pillars themselves need a large telescope or long-exposure photography to appear. It is best placed on summer evenings for northern observers, around August, and climbs higher in southern skies.

Missions

1. 1990–

   Hubble Space Telescope

   NASA / ESAActive

   Ultraviolet to near-infrared imaging from low Earth orbit.

   Mission page (opens in a new tab)

2. 2021–

   James Webb Space Telescope

   NASA / ESA / CSAActive

   Infrared observatory at Sun–Earth L2, about 1.5 million km from Earth.

   Mission page (opens in a new tab)

Related entries

• Orion NebulaM42 · the nearest large stellar nursery
• Carina Nebula: Cosmic CliffsThe edge of a star-carved cavity

Sources

1. NASA Science: Hubble revisits the Pillars of Creation (2015) (opens in a new tab)
2. ESA: ESA/Webb weic2216 (opens in a new tab)
3. NASA Science: Hubble Messier catalog: M16 (opens in a new tab)
4. ESA: ESA/Webb weic2218 (opens in a new tab)

Last reviewed 10 Oct 2026 against these sources. Built from public NASA, ESA and JPL data; not affiliated with or endorsed by any agency.