Pillars of Creation

Imagine huge, dusty fingers reaching up into space! These are the Pillars of Creation. They are made of gas and dust, like giant clouds.

They look like elephant trunks, but they are way, way bigger than any elephant you've ever seen. These amazing structures are found in a place called the Eagle Nebula, which is super far away from Earth. It takes light a very, very long time to travel from there to us!

Long ago, in 1920, a person named John Charles Duncan first saw these amazing pillars. He used a big telescope to look at the sky. Later, the super-powered Hubble Space Telescope took an even more amazing picture of them. This picture is so famous that it's been on t-shirts and coffee mugs! Scientists Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen were the ones who took this incredible photo.

The coolest thing about the Pillars of Creation is that they are like giant star nurseries! Inside the gas and dust, new baby stars are being born. But, there are also bright, hot stars nearby that are like giant cosmic blow dryers. They blast the pillars with light, making them slowly disappear. So, the pillars are building new stars while also being worn away!

These pillars are absolutely enormous! Each one is about as tall as a skyscraper, or even taller than a giant redwood tree. To give you an idea, they are much, much taller than a school bus! They are so far away, about 6,500 light-years, that it's hard to even imagine. That means light, which is the fastest thing ever, takes thousands of years to get from them to us!