Rather than being a stellar nursery the famous dust clouds in the Eagle Nebula may already be gone.

On November 2, 1995, NASA released the now-famous image of M16, the Eagle Nebula, in the constellation Serpens. Jeff Hester, an astronomer from Arizona State University, was quoted as saying:

“For a long time astronomers have speculated about what processes control the sizes of stars — about why stars are the sizes that they are. Now in M16 we seem to be watching at least one such process at work right in front of our eyes.”

Star-forming regions within nebular dust clouds have been discussed many times in previous Picture of the Day articles. The prevailing opinion among astronomers is that stars are created from the collapse of such clouds through gravitational attraction: the Nebular Hypothesis. The theory seems plausible because astronomical images portray what appear to be clouds so dense that they are opaque to visible light and span tens of light-years. What is not usually mentioned in the press releases is that the nebulae are composed of gases and dust a thousand times less dense than a puff of smoke......................