The Pillars of Creation

One of the most famous photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in 1995 was aptly named the “Pillars of Creation”.  It illustrates star-forming pillars of billowing dust and gas pointing to where “Stars are created from Chaos".  The picture we see depicts what that cosmic neighborhood looked like 7,000 years ago, as this is how long it takes to cross the intervening distance at the speed of light.

The Andromeda Galaxy is two million light-years away, thereby making it the nearest galaxy to ours. It is bigger than our Milky Way, as it contains at least one trillion stars, twice the number of stars our galaxy has.  The Andromeda Galaxy and our own Milky Way will likely merge in about four billion years in a cataclysmic and chaotic event, of death and birth of a myriad of solar systems, in our amazing and bewildering Cosmos.

Andromeda (Ἀνδρομέδα) means “ruler of men” in Greek.  She was the daughter of the King and Queen of Ethiopia.  When the vain Queen boasted that her daughter, Andromeda, was more beautiful than the Nereids, Poseidon became enraged. Consequently, he sent a sea monster, Cetus, to ravage the land of Ethiopia.  Andromeda was stripped and chained naked to a rock based on an oracle from Delphi as a sacrifice to appease the infuriated Poseidon. painting by Paul Gustave Dore (1869)

Perseus, the founder of Mycenae, was returning home and happened upon the chained Andromeda. He then sets her free and marries her. Andromeda follows her husband, first to his native island of Serifos, and from there they proceed to Argos, and they became the ancestors of the family of the Perseidae and thus according to the legend, Perseus is the ancestor of the Persians.  painting “La deliverance d’ Andromede” by Pierre Mignard (1679)

Ancient Corinthian vase depicting Andromeda, Perseus and Cetus.  Inscriptions are in archaic Greek alphabet, running to the left and using letters such as E instead of H, and reverse B and V instead of Y.