Pillars of Creation is definitely in my top 10 of astronomical phenomenon. It’s just incomprehensibly large. The largest pillar is over 4 light-years in length (23.5 Trillion miles, 37.8 Trillion km)
As much as I wish I could understand those scales alas, I never will.
It doesn’t actually look that cool outside of a photograph which is the most disappointing thing about most space images.
My cousin does image processing for NASA.
You aren’t wrong they look way different than how we choose to display them as photos but that is the art in it
Whenever I see photos like these I think “I wonder what it looks like now”
Because this is what it looked like 6,500 years ago.
6500 years is comparable to the time scales of planetary nebulae, so it may not even exist anymore. I seem to recall reading that there was a supernova near the pillars, which may have destroyed them. If this hypothesis is true, we should expect to see the destruction in about 1000 years.
Note that these simple calculations work because it is so close to us. As you get to distances comparable to the size of the observable universe, you have to start respecting GR to get the right answers.
That’s even more interesting. We really have no idea what is actually out there.
