New views of nebula in Hubble\'s most famous space photo

Images could only be captured by space telescopes, not from Earth In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope's 'Pillars of Creation' image of the Eagle Nebula became one of the most iconic images of the 20th century. Now, two of European Space Agency's orbiting observatories have captured a new - and very different - view of the nebula. The pillars are invisible in the ESA's image, which uses far-infrared light and X-rays to create a composite image that 'sees through' the clouds of dust that form the pillars in Hubble's famous image.
The shot shows how young, hot stars 'sculpt' the ultra-cool matter around them, forming new stars.
The Eagle Nebula is 6500 light-years away in the constellation Serpens.
It contains a young hot star cluster, NGC6611, visible with modest back-garden telescopes, that is sculpting and illuminating the surrounding gas and dust, resulting in a huge hollowed-out cavity and pillars, each several light-years long.
The Hubble image hinted at new stars being born within the pillars. Owing to obscuring dust, Hubble's visible light picture was unable to see inside and prove that young stars were forming.  
Combining both ends of the electromagnetic spectrum - the full spectrum of radiation that takes in everything from visible light to X-rays - the ESA's composite of the Herschel and Newton space telescope images shows hot, young stars 'sculpting' matter around them.
The stars detected by the X-ray observations are interacting with the surrounding ultra-cool gas and dust, at only a few degrees above absolute zero, in the process of forming new stars.
Both wavelengths would be blocked by Earth’s atmosphere and could only be detected by space telescopes such as Herschel and Newton.  
In visible wavelengths, the nebula shines mainly due to reflected starlight and hot gas filling the giant cavity, covering the surfaces of the pillars and other dusty structures.
At near-infrared wavelengths, the dust becomes almost transparent and the pillars practically vanish.
Intricate tendrils of dust and gas are seen to shine, giving astronomers clues about how it interacts with strong ultraviolet light from the hot stars seen by XMM-Newton.
Herschel's image makes it possible to search for young stars over a much wider region and thus come to a much fuller understanding of the creative and destructive forces inside the Eagle Nebula