Eli5: how do the pillars of creation just stay the same shape out in space for so long and how did it all accumulate in that area?
In: 7284
Everyone keeps saying “space is big” but then uses terms and numbers that you don’t have a frame of reference for. Let’s try this a different way.
Space is big, like, really really big, bigger than that. So incomprehensibly big that if you were to truly grasp the size of it, you would probably change the way you live your life. It is larger than you can possibly imagine, and things in space are *really* far apart.
The fastest thing in the universe is light at 299,792 km/second, it’s so fast that it travels around the Earth 7.5 times in the time it takes to snap your fingers. The closest object to the Earth is the moon, at an average of 384,000 km, it takes light a little over 2.5 seconds to get all the way to the moon and back. It takes 8 minutes for light to go from the Sun to the Earth (we call this 1 Astronomical Unit or AU, it is equal to 149,597,870.7 km). A light year is the distance that light can travel in a straight line for a year, 9,460,730,472,580 km, or 9.4 trillion km.
The Pillars of Creation are 6500-7000 light years away. That’s 61,494,748,071,775,200- 66,225,113,308,065,600 km or 61.4-66.2 quadrillion km. Let’s average and say 63,859,930,689,920,400 km or 63.8 quadrillion km. These numbers are literally too large for the human mind to understand in any real way. So let’s change tact again.
The fastest a human being has ever traveled was during the Apollo 10 mission in 1969 at 39,897 km/hour. Let’s call it 40,000 km/h. We could probably go faster now, but let’s stick with that number for now. If we traveled for that speed the entire way to the Pillars of Creation, it would take over 180 million years to get there.
But what is the fastest we could get there? Let’s ignore the limitations of current technology and pretend that we could go much faster, nearly 100% the speed of light. Well there’s a pretty simple answer, if we went the speed of light, it would take 7000 years (gross oversimplification, let’s not get into time dilation).
Let’s get to your actual question though, why don’t they appear to change? Because they are so massive. And the picture you see all the time is only a small part of the [Eagle Nebula ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eagle_Nebula_4xHubble_WikiSky.jpg). The leftmost pillar is 4 light years long, it’s huge. The Eagle Nebula is a stellar nursery, it’s where stars are born. Stars many times the size of our Sun are created here, and they are so small on this scale that you can barely see them. Stars that would consume our entire solar system. We probably won’t see large changes for 100 years or more.
Edit: forgot to convert units when calculating travel time.
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