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NASA, the US space agency, has released never-before-seen images captured by the James Webb Observatory, the largest and most expensive ever produced, whose launch last year ushered in a new phase of space observation. The photos show the iconic Pillars of Creation, star-filled structures of gas and dust located 6,500 light-years from Earth.

The three-dimensional structure resembles rock formations, although they are much more permeable due to their gaseous composition and space dust. The glow of thousands of stars illuminates the first image of the telescope’s landscape, with its columns in shades of brown and orange.

At the ends of several pillars are bright red flecks that look like lava — parts that NASA says in its statement “are still-forming star ejections” in gas and stellar dust. Rising stars, which are only a few hundred thousand years old, periodically launch supersonic jets that collapse with clouds of matter, like the pillars of the structure.

“By popular demand, we have to photograph the Pillars of Creation with JWST (James Webb),” tweeted Klaus Pontoppidan, science program manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the Webb from Baltimore, USA.

The “majestic” photograph will help researchers better understand the process of star formation, NASA said. This will identify much more accurate counts of newly formed stars, in addition to the amounts of gas and dust in the region.

The pillars, photographed from an angle that makes them look like an outstretched hand to the sky, are in the Eagle Nebula of the Milky Way, the same galaxy as Earth. They became famous thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb’s predecessor, which first captured them in 1995 and later in 2014.

One of the biggest differences between the new observatory and the old one, however, is that Webb can see in the infrared spectrum, while Hubble was mostly limited to the spectrum visible to the human eye and a bit in the ultraviolet. Soon, as much as they look at similar places, the new instrument will see new things and without the obstacle of cosmic dust that hides the stars.

“The universe is beautiful!” tweeted NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn.

In operation since July, the James Webb makes its observations 1.5 million kilometers from Earth and observes unprecedented points in the universe. The observatory aims to help humanity answer key questions for studying the cosmos and the origin of things – and the Pillars of Creation are far from the most distant objects they can view.

Webb is like a time machine for mankind to see the first galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago. This is possible because light travels at around 300,000 kilometers per second – distances in space are so great, however, that the brightness of the most distant objects Webb can photograph will have traveled around 13 billion light-years. In other words, they will be photographs of something that happened 13 billion years ago.

One of the main goals of this $10 billion telescope, which took 25 years to complete from design to launch, is to study the life cycle of stars. Another line of investigation of the joint project of the American, Canadian and European space agencies is the study of exoplanets, that is to say planets outside the terrestrial solar system.

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