Few pictures of the heavens have intrigued earthlings as much as a 1995 photograph of the Eagle Nebula, with its soaring star factories dubbed the Pillars of Creation. Here was star birth in action, all captured in vivid color by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Astronomers always knew it wouldn't last.

And the latest research shows that the Pillars are burning themselves out more quickly than first thought. Where the majestic structures of starlit gas and dust now soar into space, marking the architecture of a stellar womb, nothing but a few stars and black emptiness will reign in less than a million years.

The Eagle Nebula, also called M16, is a classic star forming region, a place roughly 7,000 light-years from Earth where gas and dust are thought to feed the birth of new stars. Several hot young stars born in the process now live just outside the Pillars, physically sculpting the colorful structures with intense ultraviolet light.

It's a scene repeated countless times in countless locations throughout the Milky Way galaxy and in other galaxies.

While the original Hubble image was revealing, in truth it raised more questions than it answered. The photograph was produced in visible light, which could not peer through the outer reaches of the nebula's dust.

Since then, astronomers have used infrared and radio telescopes to gain glimpses inside. In the late 1990s, they confirmed previous suspicions that the structures were burning out and might have only a million or so years to go.

The most recent study on the topic involves infrared views taken by Hubble in 1998 and released last month.

"The infrared images just show that this process is much further along in M16 than is evident in the optical pictures," said the University of Arizona's Rodger Thompson, who led the new study.

When seen at infrared wavelengths, which reveal heat emissions but not visible light, the Pillars "are quite transparent with only the tops being dense areas," Thompson told SPACE.com. "The tops are like capstones and are the only areas where star formation is proceeding at this time."

The Eagle Nebula created its first stars about 3 million years ago -- very recent by astronomical standards. Ever since, radiation from the hottest of those stars, a cluster of which are near the Pillars, has been breaking apart the dust and molecules that formed their cocoon. It's a little like the Sun evaporating water on a wet street, Thompson explained.

So how long do the Pillars have?

"It is hard to estimate the end point," he said, "but it will probably be in less than a million years, since most of the material has already been dissipated."

And then what will the region look like?

"There will just be the stars that formed before the Pillars dissipated," Thompson said. "The density of stars will be higher than average, but otherwise it will look just like any other place in the galaxy."

Thompson worked with Bradford A. Smith of the University of Hawaii and Jeff Hester of Arizona State, producing a paper that will be published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.