NASA's 3D tour of a famous cosmic masterpiece is exquisite

It's hard to pick a favorite view of space, but many astronomers hold dear the Pillars of Creation, a stunning cloud of interstellar gas and dust that resembles a human hand. 

Now NASA scientists have created a narrated 3D tour of this cosmic marvel, a small portion of the enormous Eagle Nebula about 6,500 light-years away in the Milky Way.

Rather than an artistic rendering, the movie (shown below) is based on actual scientific data acquired from a host of observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope, which took its first pictures of the famous pillars in 1995, and the James Webb Space Telescope, which views the universe in infrared light. The movie also incorporates data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the retired Spitzer Space Telescope. 

The video is intended to help people understand how different telescopes provide different kinds of information, while also giving the audience a general appreciation for how star formation occurs, said principal visualization scientist Frank Summers of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Summers will present it at the International Planetarium Society Conference in Berlin next month.

"Stars help create the dust pillars that actually are creating stars," Summers said in a statement. "Stars are forming inside the Eagle Nebula, which is a giant dust cloud."

The Pillars of Creation are mostly made of small dust grains of carbon and hydrogen, weathered by the ultraviolet radiation of nearby hot, young stars. The fingerlike pillars are gigantic, with the tallest among them stretching farther than the width of our own solar system — more than three light-years.

New stars, only a few hundred thousand years old, poke out around the edges of the cloud as rubies, courtesy of Webb's infrared view. The reddish fingertips, the result of energetic hydrogen, are coming from young stars that sometimes shoot out wavy jets. 

NASA has previously described the pillars as "practically pulsing with their activity." This new perspective gives scientists a better feel for how baby stars shed their dust cocoons over millions of years.

Researchers used the same NASA data presented in the 3D video to make this 3D-printed model of the Pillars of Creation. Credit: NASA / STScI / R. Crawford / L. Hustak

The video begins with a zoom from the Milky Way down to the Pillars of Creation, which is more than a 10,000-fold magnification. Like a gnat, the virtual camera flies in, around, and among the fingers, revealing four separate dust clouds with gas streaming away from each.

Without the 3D view, one of the pillars could go unseen. 

While the Webb telescope offers researchers a diaphanous view, piercing through dense dust, Hubble sees the cosmos in visible light, glowing at thousands of degrees. Astronomers say both views combined provide a more complete picture.