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These eerie, dark pillar-like structures are actually columns of cool interstellar hydrogen gas and dust that are also incubators for new stars. The pillars protrude from the interior wall of a dark molecular cloud like stalagmites from the floor of a cavern. They are part of the "Eagle Nebula", a nearby star-forming region 7,000 light-years away in the constellation Serpens.  The tallest pillar (left) is about a light-year long from base to tip (that is almost 6 trillion miles tall!). 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." EGGs is an acronym for "Evaporating Gaseous Globules", but it is also a word that describes what these objects are. Forming inside at least some of the EGGs are embryonic stars -- stars that abruptly stop growing when the EGGs are uncovered and they are separated from the larger reservoir of gas from which they were drawing mass. Eventually, the stars themselves emerge from the EGGs as the EGGs themselves succumb to photoevaporation. The picture was taken on April 1, 1995 with the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2.  Credit: Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen (Arizona State University), and NASA Image files. This truncated explanation and these amazing   photographs of  the pillar like structures were excerpted from  Internet postings detailing the mission of the Hubble Space Telescope.