Stellar Nursery
Enormous pillars of interstellar hydrogen gas and dust mark the birthplace of stars. This fantastic image, taken by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, depicts clouds that are in some ways like buttes in a desert, dense rock that has survived erosion over millennia. In this case, especially dense clouds of molecular hydrogen gas and dust have survived longer than their surroundings in the face of a flood of ultraviolet light from hot, massive newborn stars. Such clouds are, in essence, stellar nurseries, where the dust and gas from long-dead stars has coalesced to provide the raw material for new stars. This cluster of pillars resides in the Eagle Nebula, 7,000 light-years away in the constellation Serpens. The photo is the product of work by astronomers Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen of Arizona State University.

NISE/NSF