Where are the pillars of creation?

I hope you weren't planning to visit the Pillars of Creation anytime soon, as they are in outer space, 7000 light years away! This means even if humans could build craft that traveled at the speed of light, it would take us 7000 years to reach the Pillars of Creation.

The Pillars of Creation are a small part of the Eagle Nebula, a vast cloud of gas and dust which has formed around a young cluster of stars known as NGC6611. You can view the Eagle Nebula through a telescope by looking at the constellation of Serpens.

To give you some idea of the scale of what you are looking at in the picture above (taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995), the 'column' on the left-hand side is 4 light years in length, that's around 24 trillion miles, and is still only a small proportion of the total nebula. If you traveled 4 light years from our Sun, you would barely reach our second nearest star, Alpha Centauri.

Are the Pillars Already Dust?

The sad news doesn't end there I'm afraid. Scientists believed the Pillars of Creation may already have been destroyed. Remember that the Nebula as we see it is the Nebula as it was 7000 years ago, due to the time it takes light from the Nebula to reach Earth. Research has detected the signs of a supernova within the star cluster which happened 6000 years ago.

If this is the case, The Pillars of Creation have been dispersed into interstellar space by the force of the supernova. We have to wait another 1000 years to see for ourselves!

But we can still enjoy the sight of the Pillars and learn about them, as this YouTube film shows: