This far from a great image of this nebula. It was literally shot between the branches of a tree on one of the shortest nights of the years with quite a bit of light pollution. But if you look carefully at the center (opening the image on another page helps), you can see the feature that gives this nebula it’s name. See it down there? The “bird” in the center. There you go.
The Eagle Nebula, also known as the Star Queen Nebula, is a cluster of young stars whose birth is lighting a region of gas and dust still involved in star formation. It’s about 5,700 to 7,000 light years away from Earth, and bright enough to be glimpsed by those with good eyesight in good dark sky conditions (that would be not me, not here, and not now).
It was first cataloged in 1746 by Swiss astronomer Jean-Philippe Loys de Cheseaux who included it in a short list of nebulas he had found. Like other astronomers at the time, de Cheseaux was mostly interested in cataloging nebula for a somewhat negative reason. Since he was obsessed with finding comets, he was always looking for fuzzy objects in the sky. And since nebula are fuzzy objects, keeping a list of them made sure he wasn’t constantly mistaking one for a comet.
But de Cheseaux did put the Eagle Nebula to another use … he used it to calculate the dates of Jesus’ crucifixion and the end of the world.
The Book of Daniel 5:15
And now wise men, astrologers, were brought to read this writing, and to explain the meaning of these words. But they could not do it.
Looking at the stars was apparently not a great way to interpret your basic “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,” but de Cheseaux did think things could be flipped around, so that the motion of stars and planets could be made to explain some passages of time mention in Daniel.
It can be frustrating that guys like de Cheseaux can at one moment be doing something that seems perfectly reasonable, and at the next be trying to twist their observations into making an object thousands of light years away say something about an obscure prediction of events on Earth. But even for the most stridently anti-religious people of the 18th century, which de Cheseaux was not, it was impossible to disentangle events in Biblical literature and attempts to date the past.
That’s because their world lacked depth. They had no concept of how old anything was. Or how far away the stars they were observing actually might be. Thanks to Danish Astronomer Ole Roemer, they did have some idea of the speed of light. But still … they had no deep space, and most importantly, no deep time. It would take Scottish geologist James Hutton to begin pushing back the scale of time at the end of the 18th century, giving room for theories of creation that didn’t involve a heavy load of miracles. Most people lived in a snapshot universe, one whose existence lacked the time or space for rational explanation.
For de Cheseaux, history was short, the stars were close, and even if the Earth was no longer at the center of the Solar System, it was surely the point of the universe. Suffice to say, de Cheseaux ultimately spent a lot more time calculating “measures of the great revolutions of the diurnal, and lunar and solar periods of the heavens” and trying to fit then into a system of “epoch cycles” than he did spotting additional nebula. It’s frustrating. But understandable.
But when it comes to the Eagle Nebula, creation does come up in more than a biblical sense. This is, after all, a “star factory.” New stars, and new stellar systems, are being born there. Some 4.6 billion years ago, it’s likely that our Sun came from such a place, born along with a large number of sibling stars, before being borne along to a more rarified location by time, gravity and the breath of the galactic winds. That’s pretty majestic in any book.
That section of the nebula that look pretty birdish, is also associated with one of the most famous images created by the Hubble Telescope.
“Pillars of Creation,” Eagle Nebula, Hubble Telescope, 1995
This mosaic of images from the Hubble Telescope was stitched together by astronomers Paul Scowen and Jeff Hester, then both at Arizona State University. There is some concern that these structures, which are in constant motion from the birth and radiation of those new stars, may actually no longer exist. Nearby the star factory is another, even more violent phenomenon — the expanding wave of radiation from a supernova. Such waves can generation enough pressure to trigger the birth of new stars, but they can also erase these “cradles” leaving the resulting stars in a space where the clouds of dust and gas have been blown apart.
Whether this has already happened at the pillars are we’re just seeing the ghosts of structures long gone, isn’t clear. However, the most recent evidence seems to suggest this is one cradle of creation that’s still up and running.
De Cheseaux would probably be confused … but pleased.
