A High-Resolution Image of the Pillars of Creation with the James Webb Space Telescope and a Nebula in the Milky Way

Nearly 30 years ago, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured the first image of the Pillars of Creation — the iconic star nursery featuring thick pillars of gas and dust. Now, the new James Webb Space Telescope has captured NASA’s most detailed image of the landscape that is helping scientists better understand how stars form.

The project scientist who is working on the James Webb wrote on social media that the team wants to capture the Pillars of Creation using the telescope after seeing a lot of demand.

“The nebula, M16, is located right in the plane of the Milky Way; there are just so many stars!” Pontoppidan wrote a letter. “This image was taken in exactly the same way as the cosmic cliffs, and covers an area the same size on the sky.”

“Not only are there obvious stars speckled in every nook and cranny of this image, but if you look closely at the tips of the pillars, you can see this fiery redness,” Banks said in a Twitter video. It looks like a volcano.

The Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb’s Spectrometer: A Journey into Space with the Rigby Astronomical Telescope

Before James Webb’s success, the telescope had to endure more than 20 years of technical difficulties, cost overruns, delays, and threats from Congress to kill it altogether. Critics were not enamored with the large mirror, which had more light collecting area than the Hubble.

She saw the telescope deploy its secondary mirror perfectly even though she had a shaky vision over the course of one month. The work was to assess the telescope’s performance. The mission succeeded beyond almost everyone’s expectations. From the first jaw-dropping images released in July to the discoveries of distant galaxies and exoplanet atmospheres, JWST has dominated astronomy headlines throughout 2022. And of the thousands of astronomers who worked on the telescope over decades, Rigby has been a linchpin.

As the team had practised time and time again, launch day unfolded for Rigby at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. She heard that the telescope had separated from its rocket and extended its solar array in order to generate power. She says it is hard to imagine how much joy there was.

She couldn’t fly the space shuttle because she was too short. Sally Ride was the USastrophysicist who became an astronaut and she read about it when she was growing up in rural Delaware. Rigby didn’t meet the physical requirements to become a shuttle pilot, so she set her sights on astronomy as a way into space. She was able to use her hands-on experience of soldering and tinkering with her father’s physics project when she took her second-hand telescope out to the fields at night.

As an undergrad, she began working with data from the telescopes in Hawaii. She started graduate school at the University of Arizona in Tucson and started analyzing observations from the IRS Telescope, which helped open up new ways to look at the stars. “You put up a telescope that’s just so much better than anything we’ve had before, and you can’t help but discover stuff,” she says.

She does not want to talk about the telescope’s name. Rigby identifies as queer, and the name is controversial because it honours James Webb, who had worked in high-ranking government positions at a time when the US government persecuted and fired employees from sexual and gender minorities (LGBT+), including at least one at NASA when Webb led the agency.

A thread that ties together many LGBT+ people in astronomy, she says, is “there’s a feeling of belonging, that the Universe doesn’t reject me”. The sense of acceptance and safety is important because of the risks faced by many LGBT+ scientists. I felt like I was a part of the Universe and the larger story when I was drawn to astronomy because of my queer identity.