The Pillars of Creation, Explained: How a Star Cluster Is Sculpting Its Own Nursery

What you're actually looking at

The Pillars of Creation are three (with a fourth, smaller finger) dense columns of cold molecular hydrogen and dust standing inside the Eagle Nebula, catalogued as Messier 16 (M16), the nebula surrounding the open cluster NGC 6611. The nebula sits in the constellation Serpens, in an inner spiral arm of the Milky Way, at a distance usually quoted as about 6,500 light-years. That figure comes from the classic Hubble-era estimates; more recent parallax measurements from the ESA Gaia mission pull the cluster somewhat closer, toward roughly 5,700 light-years. Either way, the light reaching your telescope tonight left the pillars around the time humans were building the first cities.

Scale is the thing that breaks intuition here. The tallest pillar spans roughly 4 to 5 light-years from base to tip — on the order of 4 × 10¹³ km. For comparison, the entire Solar System out to Neptune is about 0.0009 light-years across, and the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.24 light-years away. In other words, a single one of these pillars is about as tall as the distance from the Sun to its nearest stellar neighbor.

They are not solid rock, despite the sculpted look. Each pillar is a rarefied cloud — denser than the surrounding nebula, but still a near-vacuum by earthly standards. What gives them their crisp, statuesque edges is not their own strength but the way they are being illuminated and eroded from the outside by a nearby cluster of massive young stars, which we'll come to next.

The stars doing the sculpting

Just off the top of the Hubble frame — above and to the upper-right of the pillars — sits the young open cluster NGC 6611. It is only about 1 to 2 million years old (compare the Sun at 4.6 billion years) and contains around a dozen ferociously luminous O-type stars, the hottest and most massive stars in the galaxy. Its brightest member, HD 168076, is a binary whose combined mass approaches 80 M☉ and whose luminosity can reach roughly a million times that of the Sun.

These O stars have surface temperatures around 30,000–45,000 K (the Sun's is about 5,800 K), so they pour out enormous amounts of ultraviolet radiation. That UV flood does two things to the surrounding cloud:

• It ionizes the gas. UV photons strip electrons from hydrogen atoms, making the diffuse gas around the pillars glow — this is the pinkish emission-line light Hubble captured.
• It boils the pillars away. The same radiation heats and erodes the exposed surfaces of the dense columns, driving material off them in a process called photoevaporation.

A common misconception (borrowed from images of the Orion Nebula) is that the Trapezium cluster lights the pillars. It does not — the Trapezium belongs to Orion, a completely different region. The Eagle Nebula's pillars are sculpted by NGC 6611. It is a useful reminder that these two famous nurseries, though visually similar, are separate objects thousands of light-years apart.

Photoevaporation and the EGGs

Here is the central mechanism, and it is where 'creation' and 'destruction' become the same story. As ultraviolet light from NGC 6611 hits a pillar, the low-density gas on the outside is heated and streams away first, evaporating like mist. But wherever a pocket of gas is denser than its surroundings, it resists longer — it shields the material directly behind it, so the pillar erodes around that clump, leaving a protruding finger with a dense knot at its tip.

Those dense knots are the famous EGGs — Evaporating Gaseous Globules, a term coined when Jeff Hester, Paul Scowen and colleagues analyzed the 1995 Hubble images. Each EGG is a compact blob of molecular gas, roughly 0.005–0.1 parsec across (about 0.016–0.33 light-year) and containing perhaps 1–20 Jupiter masses of material. Some of these EGGs are dense enough that gravity wins the race against the evaporation, and their cores collapse into protostars before the pillar can be stripped away entirely.

So the same radiation that is destroying the pillars is also uncovering and, in some cases, triggering the birth of the stars within them. The pillars are essentially being sandblasted down to their densest seeds. It is star formation caught in the act of being interrupted — a phenomenon astronomers sometimes call 'radiation-driven implosion,' where the compression from the advancing ionization front can help push a marginal clump over the edge into collapse.

The numbers: how fast, how long, how many stars

Photoevaporation is slow by human standards but fast in cosmic terms. Estimates from the Hubble data suggest the pillars are losing mass at a rate that would erode them over a timescale of a few million years. Because the erosion front eats away the low-density envelope faster than the dense cores, the pillars are effectively self-destructing on roughly the same clock that governs the lifetimes of the O stars lighting them (massive O stars live only a few million years before exploding as supernovae).

Inside the columns, JWST's near-infrared eyes revealed the payoff. Where Hubble saw mostly opaque silhouettes, the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam image — released on October 19, 2022 — pierced much of the dust and exposed hundreds of previously hidden young stars. The most dramatic features are the wavy, crimson streaks near the pillar tips:

• These are jets and shock fronts from protostars still in the act of forming.
• A young star periodically ejects supersonic outflows along its poles as it accretes; these collide with surrounding gas and light up in the infrared.
• NASA estimates these particular protostars are only about a few hundred thousand years old — astronomical newborns.

Together the two telescopes tell the full arc: Hubble shows the sculpture, JWST shows the sculptors-to-be still glowing inside the marble.

"Are the pillars already gone?" — a myth worth correcting

You will often read that the Pillars of Creation 'no longer exist' — that a supernova already blew them apart around 6,000 years ago, and we're merely seeing 6,500-year-old light of a structure that's gone. This claim went viral after a 2007 Spitzer Space Telescope study found a cloud of hot dust near the pillars, which some interpreted as the blast wave from a supernova that would eventually shred them.

It is worth being precise about what is and isn't established:

• The 'already destroyed' story is speculative, not confirmed. The hot dust could indeed mark a supernova shock — but no supernova has been directly detected, and the interpretation is debated. Even in that scenario, the destruction plays out over thousands of years, not instantly.
• The light-travel argument is real but overstated. Yes, we always see M16 as it was ~6,500 years ago. But that is true of every deep-sky object, and it does not mean the pillars are necessarily gone now.
• Photoevaporation, not a single blast, is the dominant killer. The slow UV erosion described above will consume the pillars over a few million years regardless of any supernova.

So the honest summary: the Pillars of Creation are almost certainly still there in the present-day universe, being steadily eroded, and the dramatic 'they're already destroyed' headline is not supported by solid evidence.

History and how to observe M16

The Eagle Nebula itself was discovered in the 18th century — the cluster by Jean-Philippe de Chéseaux around 1745–46, and the nebulosity catalogued by Charles Messier in 1764 as the 16th entry in his list. The pillars, however, were an obscure detail until the Hubble Space Telescope imaged them on April 1, 1995. Astronomers Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen assembled that iconic mosaic, and the nickname 'Pillars of Creation' — evoking the towers as birthplaces of stars — made the image one of the most famous astronomical photographs ever taken. Hubble revisited them in higher definition in 2014, and JWST added its infrared view in 2022.

Can you see them yourself? The pillars are far too faint and small for amateur equipment, but the Eagle Nebula that holds them is observable:

• When: The region rides highest on summer evenings in the Northern Hemisphere, roughly June through August.
• Where to look: In Serpens Cauda, near the border with Sagittarius and Scutum, close to the bright star fields of the summer Milky Way.
• What you'll see: The open cluster NGC 6611 resolves into stars in binoculars or a small telescope. The surrounding nebulosity needs a dark sky and ideally a hydrogen-beta or UHC filter; the pillars themselves remain a photographic target only.

What makes the Pillars endure culturally is not their visibility but their meaning: a single image that shows, in one frame, gas becoming stars and stars destroying gas — the cyclical machinery of the galaxy laid bare.

The two iconic views: Hubble's 1995 visible-light image versus JWST's 2022 near-infrared portrait

Property	Hubble (1995 / 2014 HD)	JWST NIRCam (2022)
Light captured	Visible + narrow-band emission (Hα, [O III], [S II])	Near-infrared (~0.9–5 µm)
What the pillars look like	Opaque, sculpted silhouettes against glowing gas	Semi-transparent; infrared sees through much of the dust
Newborn stars revealed	Few — dust hides embedded protostars	Hundreds of previously hidden young stars pop into view
Signature feature	Crisp 'fingertips' and EGGs at pillar tips	Crimson jets and shock fronts from active protostars