Another research team recently examined stars inside the Pillars at infrared wavelengths using a ground-based telescope. Mark McCaughrean and Morten Andersen, both of the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, Germany, looked into M16 with the 27-foot (8.2-meter) Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile.

Their results, which were released in December and will be published in the European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, similarly confirm the short life span of the nursery, though McCaughrean reiterated that predicting a specific time of death is difficult.

In an e-mail interview, McCaughrean discussed one of the great remaining mysteries of the Pillars and their fate inside the Eagle Nebula.

"The important question is whether the famous Pillars of Creation will manage to live up to their name, and actually form any stars before being obliterated, or are they just tattered remnants of the molecular clouds that formed the big cluster, blowing prettily in the wind before being ionized off into the sunset?"

Jeff Hester first proposed that these structures were, almost literally, eggs -- cocoons in which young stars are incubating. Dozens of them cling to the edges of the Pillars, protruding like warts. Each is about to unveil its contents as it breaks away from the main structure.

But what will be inside? Proof has been lacking that the EGGs have star-stuff in them; the visible-light Hubble images could not see inside the globules. Astronomers want to know, because M16 is thought to be representative of many star-forming regions and its dynamics could bear on the prevalence of planets in our galaxy.

The new infrared pictures reveal that out of 73 EGGs, at least 11 appear to have something inside. Equally important, McCaughrean says, there is evidence for several other newborn stars unassociated with the EGGs, still obscured within very dense dust shells.

Some of the embryos are rather wimpy, however, and will not do well. They'll be born, but then they will linger as giant yet dim gaseous objects, much bigger than planets but just shy of stardom. Brown dwarfs, they'll be called.

"If there are stars in those EGGs, then they're going to have a very rough ride as their cocoons get blasted away," McCaughrean said. "They'll have less material to gather up, making them smaller in mass than expected, and if they have circumstellar disks around them, they might find it hard to form planets."

Further study of the Eagle Nebula should reveal additional details about what's going on inside, near the top of the Pillars, where the dust is densest. That, however, will require other and more powerful telescopes.

"To wring out even the most embedded, youngest sources lurking deep in the dust beyond the reach of near-infrared wavelengths, we need a combination of the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), to make detailed images of the pillars at mid-infrared and millimeter wavelengths," McCaughrean said.