stellar-nurseries

The Pillars of Creation are not killing stars — they are building them. Inside those towering columns of cold gas, dense knots called Bok globules are collapsing under their own weight, heating up toward nuclear ignition. The James Webb Space Telescope, in 2022, showed us the newborn stars Hubble never could.

Nebulae are vast clouds of gas and dust between stars. Some are stellar nurseries where new stars form, some are shells shed by dying stars, and some are the debris of supernova explosions. The Orion Nebula is a nursery visible to the naked eye; the Crab Nebula is the expanding wreckage of a star that exploded in 1054.