 The Eagle Nebula is 20 light-years wide. Inside the Eagle there are a number of spectacular formations. These eerie dark pillar-like structures are columns of cool interstellar hydrogen gas and dust that are also incubators for new stars. In some ways these pillars are akin to buttes in the desert where dense rock has protected a region from erosion while the surrounding landscape has been worn away over millennia. In this celestial case it is especially dense clouds of molecular hydrogen gas and dust that have survived longer than their surroundings in the face of a flood of ultraviolet light from hot massive new stars. As the pillars themselves are slowly eroded away by the ultraviolet light, small globules of even denser gas buried within the pillars are uncovered. These globules have been dubbed eggs e.g. gs. Eggs is an acronym for evaporating gaseous globules, but it is also a word that describes what these objects are because forming inside at least some of the eggs are embryonic stars. Eventually the stars themselves emerge from the eggs and the eggs themselves are evaporated. Hubble has also produced an infrared image. The infrared penetrates much of the obscuring dust and gas and unveils newborn stars hidden in the visible light view. The soaring tower is 9.5 light years high, that's 90 trillion kilometers or 57 trillion miles. The bumps and fingers of material in the center of the tower are examples of eggs. These regions may look small, but each one is roughly the size of our solar system.