EYE ON THE SKY
Our roundup of this month’s best images from the world’s best telescopes
Creation and destruction
Webb recreates a classic Hubble image in stunning new detail
The Pillars of Creation, part of the Eagle Nebula in Serpens, look incredible in this new image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. Made famous in 1995 by Webb’s forebear, the Hubble Space Telescope, the pillars are made of molecular hydrogen and dust, filled with protostars.
We see them from a distance of 7,000 lightyears, but the left-hand pillar is four lightyears long; the apparently tiny protrusions at its tip are actually larger than our Solar System. The pillars have been eroded into their distinctive shapes by the ultraviolet light from nearby newly formed stars, in a process known as photoevaporation.
Sadly, the pillars were probably destroyed 6,000 years ago by a supernova, the shockwave from which can be seen approaching the formation in images from the Spitzer Space Telescope. This interpretation has been challenged by other scientists, but we won’t know for sure for another 1,000 years.
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Baby boomer
HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE, 21 OCTOBER 2022
Patches of nebulosity associated with the birth of stars, Herbig–Haro objects are commonly found in star-forming regions after new stars send out jets of ionised gas. Here, Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 focused on HH1 and HH2, two Herbig–Haro objects lurking in the constellation of Orion, about 1,250 lightyears from Earth. Parts of the gas cloud are moving at more than 400km/h and the star that formed them is actually in the centre of the image, hidden behind clouds of dust.
The ice moon cometh
JUNO, 5 OCTOBER 2022
Europa, smallest of the Galilean moons of Jupiter, displays its fractured, icy surface in this image taken from an altitude of around 412km above the frozen moon. The picture was taken with the Juno probe’s Stellar Reference Unit, a camera usually used to orientate the spacecraft using the stars. Despite only producing a black and white image, it has excellent low-light sensitivity – this photo was actually taken at night, illuminated by light reflected from Jupiter’s clouds.
X-ray afterglow
NEIL GEHRELS SWIFT OBSERVATORY, 13 OCTOBER 2022
Gamma-ray bursts are some of the most energetic and mysterious events in the Universe, huge amounts of energy likely to have been produced when black holes are born. This pulse of energy, known as GRB 221009A, came from a point 1.9 billion lightyears away in the constellation Sagitta. The burst was first detected by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which saw it shine like a beacon for 10 hours. Swift’s X-ray telescope was able to capture this afterglow.
Kind of blue
JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE & CHANDRA X-RAY OBSERVATORY, 4 OCTOBER 2022
Two telescopes combine for this deep-field image, Webb providing the infrared data and Chandra adding an X-ray view. There’s a lot going on here in galaxy cluster SMACS J0723, 4.2 billion lightyears away in the constellation of Volans, with foreground stars made notable by their diffraction spikes; background galaxies heavily lensed; and the blue glow of gas, with a mass of about 100 trillion times that of the Sun, heated to millions of degrees and radiating X-rays.