Pillars of Creation

The image above is composed of 32 sepearate images collected from the Hubble space telescope.

Located 8,000 light years away from earth in the eagle nebula, the pillars of creation are estimated to be between 3-4 million light years in length. The star forming pillars are made up mostly of dust and Hydrogen, the gas within the pillars are literally evarporating away due to the surrounding heat radiating from nearby stars. Some theorists speculate that the pillars may have been struck by a shockwave from a supernova almost 7,000 years ago. Because light travels at a "constant" speed, we won't see the destruction of the pillars for another 1,000 years. Other theorists state that stronger volumes of x-ray and radio radiation would have been measurable if the pillars had indeed been struck by a shockwave, but this is not the case.