The Pillars of Creation, Amazing Space Phenomena

If you read my previous post about the scale of the universe then you will by now know that there's some pretty amazing stuff out there in the great beyond, and this is no exception. The 'Pillars of Creation' is a photograph produced using 32 different images from four separate cameras of The Hubble Space Telescope. The photograph shows large 'pillars' of interstellar gas and dust, located 7000 light years away in the Eagle Nebula. They get their name from the shape as they are in the process of forming new stars whilst also being affected by the light from nearby stars that have recently been formed in the Nebula as well.

From Wikipedia 

It was voted as one of the top ten photographs produced by The Hubble Space Telescope by www.space.com -  a title that was well appreciated by the creators of the photo, astronomers Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen. 

Using space technology, the clever people at NASA also figured out the Pillar's composition, consisting of cool molecular hydrogen and dust. The dust is being eroded by ultraviolet rays from nearby stars. Sadly, data suggests that the Pillars have been destroyed however we cannot yet see this. This is due to the fact that they are situated over 7000 light years away from the Earth, therefore we would receive information of their destruction 7000 years after the event had happened. NASA assume they were destroyed around 6000 years ago due to a supernova, as the appearance of the cloud suggests this. The destruction should be visible to Earth in roughly 1000 years time, however some scientist argue that the pillars could have withstood the shock wave and have undergone a more gradual erosion. 

from DailyMail

The Pillars are, or were, huge! They are predicted to be around 4 light years tall, meaning it takes 4 years for light from the top of the pillars to reach the bottom! It's hard to visualise how big this actually is, as we don't have rulers measuring 'Light Years' - however I'll put it this way to help it easier to understand:  4 light years is around the same distance to the next star system to us. 

I hope this post has interested you as it did me to write it. Feel free to share and check out my other posts! Thanks for reading. 

The Scale of the Universe

Not often contemplated by the average man is the scale of the universe we are living in. "It's a small world." is a well known quote, song and painfully boring Disney ride, however it's somewhat of an understatement. The real phrase should be, "It's an incredibly minute world." simply because, well, it is. Our earth may seem big to us, heck, even London seems huge to me even though its a rather average sized city in comparison, but in reality it is not. You most likely learnt in primary school, or in some physics lesson, that the Earth on which we live could fit inside The Sun around 1,000,000 times. Already we can barely comprehend the size The Sun must be. It seems small when we look at it in the sky, usually a ball no bigger than a 5 pence piece, however in retrospect it looks something more like this:

from Visual Learning Systems 

 So yeah that's a little scary. But that's only the start, you see. The Sun, one star in the billions in our Galaxy is not huge either. Its roughly average size, maybe a little on the small side. There are stars much bigger, and that's what's even more interesting. In this image here (too high resolution to properly show here) we can see that The Sun, 109 times bigger than Earth, is a mere singular pixel in the photo. We then compare that to the biggest star in the photo, VY Canis Majoris, and we have no words. Then you read this and I tell you that VY Canis Majoris is actually not the biggest star we no of. The award goes to complexly and lovingly named  R136a1. R136a1 is the single largest star known to man, and has a luminosity of almost 8,700,000 times that of The Sun. Its roughly 265 solar masses, which is a unit of measure meaning that it is 265 times the mass of our Sun (which happens to be two nonillion kilograms). That's rather heavy. Thinking about all this hurts, and it hurts even more when you realise that there is not only 1 Galaxy, there are billions and trillions, and these billions and trillions of Galaxies, filled with billions and trillions of stars and planets, clump together to make Super Clusters.

Super Clusters near to earth - From Wikipedia 

The idea of how small we are is actually somewhat painful. No longer will we be able to roam around like we own the place, well we do own the place but the place happens to be horrendously minuscule in the grand scale of things. After trying to comprehend all this your brain should be slightly aching, if its not I haven't tried hard enough informing you, but if it is, I know that feeling, bro. Like I said before, it's not a 'Small World', it's an incredibly minute world.