The Pillars of Creation, in 3D

What you’re looking at

Three columns of gas and dust, light-years tall

The Pillars of Creation are towers of cold hydrogen gas and dust inside the Eagle Nebula. Hubble first photographed them in 1995 and again, in sharper detail, in 2014. The photograph this scene is built from is the 2014 one.

In 2022 the James Webb Space Telescope looked at them in near-infrared light, which passes through much of the dust that blocks visible light. Switch to Webb above and the pillars turn translucent, and thousands of stars appear that Hubble couldn’t see, including newborn ones glowing red at the pillars’ edges.

• About four light-years tall

  The tallest pillar, on the left, stretches about four light-years from base to tip: roughly 23 trillion miles.

• Stars are forming inside

  Dense knots of gas inside the pillars are collapsing under their own gravity into new stars. Some of the tips may hide young stars still wrapped in dust.

• Eroding in starlight

  Hot, young stars nearby flood the pillars with ultraviolet light, slowly boiling away their gas. The glowing edges are where it’s happening.

• Inside the Eagle Nebula

  The pillars sit inside the Eagle Nebula (M16), a vast cloud of gas and dust about 6,500 light-years away, in the constellation Serpens.

• Light from long ago

  The light in this image left the pillars around 6,500 years ago, before humans had invented writing.

How we built it

From a flat photo to a scene you can walk around

• We traced the pillars by hand. Color alone can’t tell the pillars from the gas around them, so their outline is drawn over the photo.
• The browser builds the scene from the photo, in a background thread, so the page stays responsive. Every point takes its color from Hubble’s image: up to 450,000 on a desktop, fewer on a phone.
• Depth comes from shape. The farther a spot is from a pillar’s edge, the thicker the pillar is there, which turns the outline into rounded columns. Gas is layered in front of and behind them.
• Stars are found automatically and placed in space, drawn with the spikes each telescope produces: four points for Hubble, six for Webb.
• Two telescopes, one scene. We aligned Webb’s image to Hubble’s by matching stars in both, so every point also takes a color from Webb’s view. Switching telescopes blends between the two.
• The tour flies the camera from one point of interest to the next, so you can see the pillars up close without having to steer.
• It runs on WebGL, pauses when you scroll away, and switches the motion off for anyone who has asked their device to reduce motion.

Both images are flat, so the depth here is our reconstruction from Hubble’s photo, not a measured 3D model. It’s an interpretation, made to give a sense of scale and shape.

Image by NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), from HubbleSite. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Webb image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; image processing by Joseph DePasquale, Anton M. Koekemoer and Alyssa Pagan (STScI). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. We rotated and scaled it to line up with Hubble’s photo, and filled the corner Webb didn’t cover with dark space.