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
The planets don’t seem to be moving, unless you watch for weeks or months. I imagine it’s the same thing with the Pillars of Creation, but now on the scale of perhaps thousands or millions of years, since they’re so much bigger than just our solar system
The entirety of humanity’s existence is not “so long” to space.
It’s not even very long for this planet.
It’s scale, use the Earth as an example. It looks flat, but we know it’s round (if you don’t, there’s multiple experiments you can do to test).
We are so small, from our perspective, this lump of dirt appears flat. The scale if humans vs Earth is astronomically bigger that it’s hard to comprehend for some people in flat-earthers.
Now consider the pillars of creation, they are 6500 light-years away. The distance of a single LY is unimaginable to most people, myself included. They are so far away, we’re seeing what it looks like 6500 years ago.
Basically, it comes down to the limitations of humans. If you could watch the pillars of creation over a 10,000 year span, you would eventually see change. So far, we’re 27 years since the first picture taken of POC and it was relatively poor resolution, compared to JWST.
Tl;dr: They are changing, but our perspective limits our ability to see it change.
Because the pillars are absolutely massive, they are changing but because they are so big the change happens very slowly, it takes decades to see even small changes in its shape but the pillars are traveling through the galaxy just like the stars are.
Just to put it into perspective on how big the pillars are they stretch about 4-5 light years across, one light year is roughly 9.4 trillion kilometers
Part of the reason why the pillars appear to change relatively slowly is because the material that constitutes them is incredibly diffuse. There’s not enough “stuff” in them to change with the rapidity that we associate with gaseous bodies like clouds that we’re familiar with on earth.
From our distant perspective, they appear to look like the dense, lumpy material in lava lamps, but that’s only because we’re looking through pillars that are a half light year in depth.
Up close, it’s a different story. In fact, if you were an astronaut in the middle of one of the pillars, you *wouldn’t see anything at all.* The actual density of the pillars is only 4,000 particles per cubic centimeter, which is less than the most sophisticated artificial vacuums in laboratories. Yet at a half light year in diameter, each pillar is humongous in size, with an astronomically gargantuan number of particles to look at from afar–and that’s why we see them as physical shapes.
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