The Eagle

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, J. Hes­ter and P. Scowen (Ari­zona State University)

This eagle is a nurs­ery for new stars. In this dra­matic image from the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope taken in 1995, the baby stars are being born from eggs, small pock­ets of gas and dust. These columns of dust, like sta­lag­mites in a cave are light years long. The Eagle Neb­ula, or M-16, is about 7,000 light years from Earth in the con­stel­la­tion Ser­pens, the Serpent.

A light year is the time it takes light to travel in a year, about 6 tril­lion miles (that’s 12 zeros behind the 6). The dis­tances in space are so huge that sci­en­tists break down the big num­bers into eas­ier chunks mak­ing it eas­ier for us to imag­ine the dis­tances. It takes light almost 9 min­utes just to reach Earth from the sun. The clos­est star is four light years away, so a trip to the Eagle Neb­ula would be a long one.

Credit: MPG/ESO 2.2-meter Tele­scope at La Silla, Chile

The neb­ula get its name from its over­all shape to astronomers look­ing through tele­scopes on Earth. In this case, the neb­ula looks like fly­ing eagle with talons.

The dark areas in the upper right aren’t big bite marks. The images from Hub­ble Space Tele­scope are actu­ally made up of many smaller images. The dark areas are places where Hub­ble did not take an image.

Does the Eagle Neb­ula look like any­thing else to you?