Dying star may have toppled 'pillars of creation'
- January 16, 2007
THE scorching blast of a dying star may have destroyed the "pillars of creation", one of the most famous objects photographed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
The three majestic pillars - shaped within the Eagle Nebula by radiation and winds from hot, massive stars - were first captured by the HST in visible light in 1995.
Now, new infrared images collected by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory suggest the shock wave from a nearby exploding star, a supernova, has probably toppled the dusty towers.
According to team leader Nicolas Flagey - a French graduate student the California Insitute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California - the damage was done about 6000 years ago.
But beause the Pillars are located 7000 light-years away in the Constellation Cassiopeia, it will take another 1000 years or so for the confirmatory light to reach Earth, travelling at nearly 10 million million kilometres per year.
"I remember seeing a photograph of these pillars more than a decade ago and being inspired to become an astronomer," Mr Flagey said at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle, Washington.
"Now we have discovered something new about this region we thought we understood so well," he said.
But as the death throes of one star have destroyed the famous Pillars, another dying star is creating a stellar nursery, something never before observed by scientists.
Australian astronomer Michael Ireland, also of Caltech, reported at the AAS meeting that dust from Mira A - an ageing red giant star 350 light-years away in the constellation Cetus - is being pulled into a disc by the gravitational field of its companion star, Mira B.
According to Dr Ireland, the disc is the type of structure where planets form. He estimated that by the time Mira A becomes a defunct white dwarf it will have dumped three to five Jupiters' worth of matter into the disc, enough to form a planetary system like our own.
"This discovery opens up a new way to search for young planets, by searching in double star systems that contain white dwarfs," said Dr Ireland. "An ageing star is laying the foundation for a new generation of planets."
