Webb’s new view of the Pillars of Creation were first made famous when imaged by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 and then again in 2014.
The three-dimensional pillars look like majestic rock formations, but are far more permeable. These columns are made up of cool interstellar gas and dust that appear – at times – semi-transparent in near-infrared light, NASA said.
The twinkling of thousands of stars illuminates the telescope's first shot of the gigantic gold, copper and brown columns standing in the midst of the cosmos.
At the ends of several pillars are bright red, lava-like spots. "These are ejections from stars that are still forming," only a few hundred thousand years old, NASA said in a statement.
These "young stars periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, like these thick pillars," the US space agency added.
The "Pillars of Creation" are located 6,500 light years from Earth, in the Eagle Nebula of our Milky Way galaxy.
The new view "will help researchers revamp their models of star formation by identifying far more precise counts of newly formed stars, along with the quantities of gas and dust in the region," NASA said in material accompanying the latest image.
"By popular demand, we had to do the Pillars of Creation" with Webb, Klaus Pontoppidan, the science program manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said Wednesday on Twitter.
STScI operates Webb from Baltimore, Maryland. "There are just so many stars!" Pontoppidan added.
NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn summed it up: "The universe is beautiful!" she wrote on Twitter. The image, covering an area of about eight light years, was taken by Webb's primary imager NIRCam, which captures near-infrared wavelengths -- invisible to the human eye.
The colors of the image have been "translated" into visible light.
Nearly two decades in the making under contract for NASA by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp, the $9 billion Webb infrared telescope was launched to space on December 25, 2021, in partnership with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
Operational since July, Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built, and has already unleashed a raft of unprecedented data. Scientists are hopeful it will herald a new era of discovery.
It reached its destination in solar orbit nearly 1 million miles from Earth a month later and is expected to revolutionize astronomy by allowing scientists to peer farther than before and with greater precision into the cosmos, to the dawn of the known universe.
(With inputs from agencies)
