And now wonder, ye angels

On the Pillars of Creation

Author’s note: This is another essay in a series on my favorite astronomical images (here, and here are two others). Today: the original 1995 Hubble Space Telescope image of the Pillars of Creation.

The Pillars of Creation; credit: NASA, Jeff Hester, and Paul Scowen

Though this is perhaps the image that catapulted the Hubble Space Telescope into the public eye, I must admit, it initially wasn’t one of my favorites. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful image – the type of thing that ends up on sweatpants, ink pens, and desktop backgrounds. Beautiful, yes, but there’s also something somber about the image, something, when I first saw it in high school, I couldn’t put my finger on. Not to mention, what the heck is it? I had no idea.

I’ve since learned a few things. The New York Times, on the initial release of this image in November, 1995, called it “a kind of fantasyland of powerful cosmic forces,” and it wasn’t far from the truth. The image shows the great blue green heart of the Eagle Nebula, a nursery for baby stars 7000 light years away in the heart of Serpens, the great snake. But this is no standard neonatal unit. Like a castle from some ghostly Disney dream, giant smoky columns rise through the image like great stalagmites - four light years high - covered in eerie blue fuzz, and occasionally pierced by bright pink diamonds of light. Close inspection reveals tiny ornate tendrils, decorative busts, spires topped with floating embryonic blobs.

But unlike most Disney castles, the Eagle Nebula is home to thousands of baby stars, some newly formed, some still in utero. Like protective cocoons, the dark towers are clouds of gas and dust which shield the developing protostars from outside radiation and also provide material from which the infant suns draw their mass. 

Yet, this maternity ward is a dangerous place. Stars develop at different rates: in the part of the nebula imaged here, several massive new stars have already formed just off the top edge of the image, shedding their dark clouds, and shining brilliantly for all the universe to see. But that new light reeks havoc on the rest of the nursery. The star’s hot ultraviolet light pours out on the nebula that birthed them, carving away its structure like soft sandstone at the edge of a violent sea. The remaining dark clouds sizzle in the light: here we see in action ghostly streamers of gas boiling away, like steam rising, like hair stood on end.

Might our hair rise too? Those clouds still harbor developing protostars, still reliant on their nourishing mass. And yet, as we watch, they are being eaten away. 

So the clouds resist, at least the thickest ones. Just as denser rock might resist longer against an ocean’s grinding flow, here, the densest balls of dust and hydrogen gas defy, at least temporarily, the pounding UV light. In the process they form a shield for the softer clouds below, creating the dramatic pillars. NASA describes the process as “akin to buttes in the desert”: great peninsulas, protected from erosion by denser, solid rock, emerging over millennia as the earth around them is slowly worn away.

Perhaps as I look at these pillars, I can see hard tipped buttes. But that takes a stretch. No, when I look I see fingers, charred and burning, held in a defiant last stand against the brilliant new lights above. 

It’s a stand that can’t last. Sooner or later the pillars will be overcome. Yet, as they evaporate – something to notice – as they evaporate, small compact blobs are revealed, like pebbles from a glacier. Many of the blobs, called “Evaporating Gaseous Globules,” or EGGs by astronomers, won’t make it - they’ll be destroyed too. But a few will be developed enough to hatch, and those, well, those will make light from the hand that formed them. 

All these riches in one dramatic image. 

When the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 it was intended principally as a scientific instrument, with some administrators and astronomers, concerned about malfunctions and early access, arguing against showing pictures to the general public. However, this startling image was key in bringing about that change, thrusting Hubble and astronomy into the public spotlight. 

I’m not sure why exactly it resonated so much. But I suspect that the name that has stuck since shortly after its release might give us some clues: The Pillars of Creation. Yes, as much as the vivid colors and eerie details stand out, there’s something about peaking in on the act of creation itself – a kiln mid-firing – about seeing in ultrasonic definition the distorted structures on which the birth of solar systems depend. That we – our planet – might have originated from such twisted beauty: it makes my heart thump louder.

I haven’t been able to verify the origins of the name, but several sources point out its appearance in an 1857 sermon by the baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. The dramatic riches of a creator God certainly got Spurgeon’s heart pumping. “‘Glory to God’ was written all over space,” Spurgeon comments early in that sermon. Oh if he would have know what Hubble would reveal nearly a century and a half later, the breathtaking riches hidden just beneath the covers of the night. 

But the majesty of cosmic formation isn’t the heart of it. No, the most dramatic thing about these pillars is, though they hold the power to form worlds, eventually they will become vaporized dust. In the very act of creation they crumble – their existence sacrificed that new light might appear. 

Spurgeon, of course, could not have know the dramatic story of this image – the ionizing power of ultraviolet light, nor the intricacies of photoevaporation. And yet, the story of his sermon is, in many ways, the same.  At the heart of Christian theology is this hope: that the Creator God of the Cosmos gave up the riches of the heavenly sphere to live, suffer, and die as a human being. In so doing he formed a bridge to humanity: that humans might hope someday to share in his heavenly glory.

This too is the core of Spurgeon’s oration. “And now wonder, ye angels, the Infinite has become an infant;” Spurgeon writes. “He who created all things, and bears up the pillars of creation, hath now become so weak that he must be carried by a woman!” 

If he could see them now, would not Spurgeon wonder at these stellar foundations? Would he not wonder at these weakening “Pillars of Creation”: not the first time a creator’s hand was burned by its own creation, or was destroyed to allow for new light?

A far fetched connection? Perhaps. But then again, this is the universe our telescopes reveal. A universe not just of rich creation, but also of sacrificial dust. 

Eugene Peterson argues to Christian believers that being a Christian means accepting the “terms of creation.” By that I think Peterson meant accepting that, for all human desire to control the processes of our universe, we are not God. Nor does God conform to any human idea: on our little planet we, at best, reflect God’s image — not God ours. 

I might go further and say that to be human, at the end of the day, means accepting the terms of creation. Terms that mean we live in a universe of infinite riches, but also of very real destruction and pain. Terms that remind us that long before these pillars we photograph evaporate, to dust we will have returned. But terms that remind us too that that dust will again, one day, form a star.