The pillars of creation, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. Image: Greg Bacon, Ralf Crawford, Joseph DePasquale, Leah Hustak, Christian Nieves, Joseph Olmsted, Alyssa Pagan and Dr Frank Summers (STScI), NASA's Universe of Learning
NASA has combined the data from the two images into a 3D video, to give viewers an in-depth look at the stunning pillars and see how the images compliment each other.
Two of the world’s most powerful space telescopes – the Hubble and the James Webb – have teamed up once again to give us a deeper view at a cosmic phenomenon.
The pillars of creation are celestial structures made of gas in the Eagle Nebula, which were made famous by an image taken by Hubble in 1995. The beautiful image of these towering finger-like pillars has astounded people since then, but NASA wanted more detail – this is where James Webb comes in.
By combining data taken by both Hubble and Webb, NASA has created its own 3D visualisation of the cosmic pillars, letting viewers take a deeper look at the structure and note the differences between the two images.
The Hubble image captures the pillars of creation in a visible-light setting, while Webb uses its infrared instruments to capture some finer detail. The visualisation created by NASA swaps between the two images and shows how they complement each other.
“By flying past and amongst the pillars, viewers experience their three-dimensional structure and see how they look different in the Hubble visible-light view versus the Webb infrared-light view,” said Dr Frank Summers of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). “The contrast helps them understand why we have more than one space telescope to observe different aspects of the same object.”
The pillars of creation, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. Image: Greg Bacon, Ralf Crawford, Joseph DePasquale, Leah Hustak, Christian Nieves, Joseph Olmsted, Alyssa Pagan and Dr Frank Summers (STScI), NASA’s Universe of Learning
Instead of being an artistic representation, NASA said the 3D video is based on observational data from a science paper led by Dr Anna McLeod, who served as a scientific advisor for this project.
“The pillars of creation were always on our minds to create in 3D,” said Greg Bacon of STScl. “Webb data in combination with Hubble data allowed us to see the pillars in more complete detail.
“Understanding the science and how to best represent it allowed our small, talented team to meet the challenge of visualising this iconic structure.”
This isn’t the first time Webb teamed up with its powerful predecessor Hubble to further our understanding of the cosmos. Last year, the two space telescopes teamed up to provide a stunning image of MACS0416, a galaxy cluster located roughly 4.3bn light-years from Earth.
In 2022, the two titan space telescopes teamed up to capture the result of NASA’s successful Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). The space telescopes took simultaneous observations of the collision as the DART spacecraft crashed into its target asteroid Dimorphos.
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