New "Eagle Nebula" image. Credit: Rodger I. Thompson, Bradford A. Smith, J. Jeff Hester

The University of Arizona-built 'infrared eyes' of the Hubble Space Telescope will be reopened to the universe in the NASA's next shuttle mission. A new infrared image of the "Pillars of Creation" is a glimpse of what is to come.

Scientists revealed the new infrared images taken with the UA-built infrared camera on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) during a Feb. 15 NASA-televised news briefing on the upcoming shuttle mission to the telescope.

The images were taken by UA astronomy Professor Rodger I. Thompson, Arizona State University Professor Jeff Hester, and former UA planetary scientist Brad Smith. They show a very different view of the famous "Pillars of Creation" optical image that Hester took with the HST optical camera in 1995.

Seven astronauts will board Columbia Feb. 28 for an 11-day mission to upgrade and enhance the 2.4-meter Hubble.

UA scientists are intensely interested because the goal of one of five planned spacewalks is to revitalize NICMOS, the infrared camera and spectrometer built by UA scientists for the HST. The crew is to install an experimental cooling system and an associated radiator for NICMOS.

The new NICMOS image of the Eagle Nebula, taken before the camera's coolant was expended in 1999, demonstrates the importance of restoring the Hubble's "infrared eyes,"said Thompson, who is principal investigator on NICMOS.

M16, NGC 6611, the Eagle Nebula, is a well studied region of star formation and the source of a widely recognized Hubble Space Telescope image. High spatial resolution infrared observations with the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) on HST reveal the detailed morphology of two embedded star formation regions that are heavily obscured at optical wavelengths. It is striking that only limited portions of the visually obscured areas are opaque at 2.2 microns. although the optical images imply substantial columns of material, the infrared images show only isolated clumps of dense gas and dust.

Rather than being an active factory of star production, only a few regions are capable of sustaining current star formation. Most of the volume in the columns may be molecular gas and dust, protected by capstones of dense dust.

Two active regions of star formation are located at the tips of the optical northern and central large 'elephant trunk" features shown in the WFPC2 images. They are embedded in two capstones of infrared opaque material that contains and trails behind the sources. Although the presence of these sources was evident in previous observations at the same and longer wavelengths, the NICMOS images provide a high resolution picture of their morphology. Two bright stars appear at the tip of the southern column and may be the result of recent star formation at the top of that column. These observations suggest that the epoch of star formation in M16 may be near its endpoint.